Water Data Science for Action
International Water Management Institute (IWMI), West Africa Office, AccraResearch ConsultantMay 2025 – Present
Research consultancy at IWMI’s West Africa office, converting earth observation and distributed hydrological modelling into decision-ready water data for basin managers and national agencies.
The consultancy sits inside IWMI’s water data science programme, where the question is not only what the hydrology says but whether anyone downstream of the model can act on it. The brief runs from model configuration and simulation through validation and trend analysis to the figures, summaries and indicator sets that reach a dashboard or a basin authority.
Two workstreams sit under the appointment: the Google-funded Lerma–Santiago Basin study in Mexico, which pairs naturalised and reservoir-regulated discharge simulation to characterise managed flow, and DIWASA V2, the World Bank-funded continental hydrology and discharge modelling programme covering Africa from 1992 to 2050.
Both share a method. Open modelling chains — VegET for water balance, mizuRoute for river routing, mizuLake for reservoir regulation — are run against MERIT hydrography and satellite-derived inputs, then compared across products so that the spread between them becomes part of the answer rather than a footnote to it.
