Assessing the impacts of climate change in Mediterranean catchments under conditions of data scarcity The Gaza case study

As Mediterranean countries are likely to be at high risk for water scarcity due to climate change, hydrological studies are necessary. One of the goals of the project CLIMB (Climate Induced Changes on the Hydrology of Mediterranean Basins - www.climb-fp7.eu) is to reduce uncertainties and quantify risks due to hydrological changes induced by climate change. In this study a remote sensing approach, to provide benchmarks for the validation of hydrological model results, in a data scarce area, is presented to. Evapotranspiration patterns are derived from land surface temperature (LST) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The resulting mean annual evapotranspiration of ~450mm seems reasonable, however likely to overestimate the real actual evapotranspiration, hence can serve as a benchmark for model validation. The final modeled evapotranspiration of ~400mm shows similar inter annual distributions and therefore acceptable results.