Developing Sediment Yield Prediction Equations for Small Catchments in Tanzania - Advances in Data, Methods, Models and Their Applications in Geoscience - page 245

2. Materials and methods
2.1 Description of the study area
The study area, Tanzania, is situated in East Africa just south of the equator (Fig. 2.1).
Tanzania lies between the area of the great Lakes—Victoria, Tanganyika, and Nyasa—and
the Indian Ocean. It contains a total area of 945,087 km 2 , including 59,050 km 2 of inland
water (Fig. 2.1). It is bounded on the North by Uganda and Kenya, on the East by the Indian
Ocean, on the South by Mozambique and Malawi, on the South West by Zambia, and on the
West by Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda, with a total boundary length
of 4,826 km, of which 1,424 km is coastline.
Tanzania has a tropical climate with 3 major climatic zones (Fig. 2.2) viz. dry, moderate and
wet. Moderate Climatic zone occupies a large area of Tanzania (URT, 1999). It receives rainfall
for 1 to 3 months in a year. The administrative regions which fall under this climatic zone are
Tabora, Mwanza, Mara, Iringa, Morogoro, Arusha, Tanga, Moshi, Lindi and Bukoba. In the
highlands, temperatures range between 10 and 20 °C (50 and 68 °F) during cold and hot
seasons, respectively. The rest of the country has temperatures rarely falling lower than 20 °C
(68 °F). The hottest period extends between November and February (25 - 31 °C) while the
coldest period occurs between May and August (15 - 20 °C ). Tanzania has two major rainfall
regions. One is unimodal (December - April) and the other is bimodal (October - December
and March - May). The former is experienced in southern, south-west, central and western
parts of the country, and the latter is found to the north and northern coast. In the bimodal
regime the March - May rains are referred to as the long rains or “Masika”, whereas the
October - December rains are generally known as short rains or “Vuli”.
Fig. 2.1. Location map of Tanzania