Jornal de Ciências da Terra e Mudanças Climáticas

Abstrato

Predicting Hydrological Response to Climate Change in the White Volta Catchment, West Africa

Awotwi A, Kumi M, Jansson PE, Yeboah F and Nti IK

This study uses an ensemble of Regional Climate Model (REMO), to simulate and project the climate at local scale in order to investigate the hydrological impact of possible future climate change in White Volta Catchment (West Africa). The results, obtained from the REMO climate model, were compared to the observational datasets for precipitation and temperature for the period 1995-2008. The projected meteorological variables for the period 2030-2043 were used as input to the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological model which was calibrated (R2 = 0.88 and NSE= 0.84) and validated (R2 = 0.82 and NSE= 0.79) with historical data to investigate the possible impact of climate change in the catchment. The results obtained from the investigation revealed that catchment is sensitive to climate change. With a small increase of 8% and 1.7% of the mean annual precipitation and temperature respectively, annual surface runoff, annual baseflow and evapotranspiration recorded increment of 26%, 24% and 6% respectively.