Impact of climate change on water availability in the Oueme catchment at the outlet of the Save’s bridge (Benin, West Africa)

Abstract

One of the major threats to water resources today remains climate change. The objective of this study is to assess the impact of climate change on water availability in Oueme catchment at Savè. Precipitation provided by three regional climate models (RCMs) was analyzed. Bias in these data was first corrected using the Empirical Quantile Mapping (EQM) method be for etheir use as input to hydrological models. To achieve the objective, six hydrological models were used (AWBM, ModHyPMA, HBV, GR4J, SimHyd and Hymod). In projection, the results showed that the AWBM model appears to be the best. The multi-model approach further improves model performance, with the best obtained with combinations of the models AWBM-ModHyPMA-HBV. The AWBM model showed a fairly good capability for simulating flows in the basin with only HIRHAM5 climate model data as input. Therefore, the simulation with the HIRHAM5 data as inputs to the five (05) hydrological models, showed flows that vary at the horizons (2025, 2055 and 2085) under the scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). Indeed, this variation is largely due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.