Lake Victoria is the largest lake in Africa and its outflows strongly influence flows in the White Nile, including the availability of water for hydropower generation, irrigation and water supply. In this paper, we consider the history of water balance estimates for the lake and how the science has developed as new information and techniques have become available before placing the results into a wider context including the challenges arising from a changing climate.

The theme of the paper is exploration of the potential for seasonal flow forecasting for large lakes using a range of stochastic transfer function techniques with additional insights gained from simple analytical approximations. The methods were evaluated using records for two of the largest lakes in the world. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of the results to operational flow forecasting systems for other large lakes.

This paper describes simple models of phosphorus load which are identified for three catchments in the UK. The models use new hourly observations of phosphorus load, which capture the dynamics of phosphorus transfer in small catchments that are often missed by models with a longer time step. Unlike more complex, process-based models, very few parameters are required, leading to low parameter uncertainty. Interpretation of the dominant phosphorus transfer modes is made based solely on the data.