Simulating future trends in hydrological regime of a large Sudano-Sahelian catchment under climate change
Résumé
This paper assesses the future variability of water resources in the short, medium and long terms over a large Sudano-Sahelian catchment in West Africa. Flow simulations were performed with a daily conceptual model. A period of nearly 50 years (1952-2000) was chosen to capture long-term hydro-climatic variability. Calibration and validation were performed on the basis of a multi-objective function that aggregates a variety of goodness-of-fit indices. The climate models HadCM3 and MPI-M under SRES-A2 were used to provide future climate scenarios over the catchment. Outputs from these models were used to generate daily rainfall and temperature series for the 21st century according to: (i) the unbias and delta methods application and (ii) spatial and temporal downscaling. A temperature-based formula was used to calculate present and future potential evapotranspiration (PET). The daily rainfall and PET series were introduced into the calibrated and validated hydrological model to simulate future discharge.