Perceptions and realities of water and conflict in basins such as the Nile vary widely. The river continues to be brought into debates about “water wars” by writers on the subject. One of the major problems with the “water wars” thesis is that it includes only a cursory understanding of “scarcity” issues, and of the actual facts and figures that underlie much of the analysis. This fact is as a result of the difficulties and subsequently the inability to be able to model the Nile flows satisfactorily due to the complexity of the geography, the hydrology and the climate – which are the major drivers of the hydrologic system of the Nile basin. One of the main features of the Nile basin is its varied geography. The second major feature of the of the basin is the hydrological diversity of the two major tributaries of the Nile River. The Blue Nile has a huge seasonality which yields flows mainly concentrated from July to October. The total flow of Blue Nile (including its tributaries) varies greatly from a high of 15.6 BCM in August to just 0.3 BCM in April. The White Nile’s average monthly maximum (October) and minimum (February) discharges var y only slightly from 1.4 billion cubic meters (BCM) to 1.2 BCM, A third major feature of the river system is caused by virtue of the river’s situation in hot, arid areas whe re evaporation losses are high. The north–south orientation of the River Nile on the African continent ensures extreme variability in climate between the extremes of the basin. The Nile Basin receives annually an average rainfall of about 650 mm, or a total of about 1,900 BCM per year. Long-term mean annual flow at Aswan is about 85 BCM per year, making the annual runoff coefficient of the basin to be very small (about 4.5 percent) compared to other basins of the same size in other parts of the world. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of modeling the flows of the Nile.