Completed doctorate Oscar Manuel Baez Villanueva

Oscar Manuel Baez Villanueva (Bild: privat)

Oscar Manuel Baez Villanueva completed his doctorate cooperatively under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Lars Ribbe (Institute for Technology and Resources Management in the Tropics and Subtropics of TH Köln) and Prof. Dr. Nguyen Xuan Thinh from TU Dortmund, which was graded as 'summa cum laude'. He also obtained the 'Dissertationspreis' 2022 at TU Dortmund.

This cumulative dissertation shows how open access global precipitation products can be evaluated, corrected, and used to predict streamflow (water flowing in the rivers) at the daily temporal scale in data-scarce regions in combination with ground-based measurements by following a three-step approach: i) performance evaluation of different precipitation products over regions with different climates and at multiple temporal scales; ii) development of a novel merging method to improve the representation of precipitation at the daily scale; and iii) assessment of the ability of the novel merged product altogether with state-of-the-art precipitation products to predict daily streamflow over ungauged catchments through the implementation of regionalisation approaches.

The results of this dissertation show that precipitation datasets can be improved if they are efficiently combined with ground-based measurements to strive towards informed-based decision-making in data-scarce regions. This is crucial as it opens the opportunity of using these products for operational purposes such as implementing early warning systems, predicting streamflow in ungauged catchments, characterising and monitoring extreme weather events, optimise agricultural practices, and overall, to strive towards informed-based decicion-making approaches.