Estimation of the Impact of Climate Change on Water Resources Using a Deterministic Distributed Hydrological Model in C&amp;#244;te d’Ivoire: Case of the Aghien Lagoon

This work aims to evaluate the  impact of climate change on the quantitative availability of the Aghien lagoon  located in the north of the Abidjan district in Cote d’Ivoire. In the first step, the  semi-distributed SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tools) based physical model (Arnold et al., 1998) was calibrated and validated at the monthly time step over the period  1960-1981, in the Me watershed for which data from flow rates are available. SWAT was then applied on the watershed of the lagoon of Aghien which is  ungauged but for which the challenges are considerable for the drinking water  supply of the Abidjanese population. In the second step, the gross outputs (precipitation, temperatures) of six  climate models of the CORDEX-Africa project under the “Representative  Concentration Pathways” (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) scenarios were corrected using  the delta method. These corrected outputs were  used at the SWAT model input to project the impact of climate change on the  flow of the Aghien lagoon to horizons 2040 (2035-2056), 2060 (2057-2078) and  2080 (2079-2100). The projections made on  these different horizons were compared with the simulated flow over the period  1960-1981. The results show a sensible decrease in the annual flow of the Aghien  lagoon compared to the reference period (1960-1981). Under the medium  assumption (RCP 4.5), the models predict a decrease in the annual discharge  almost 10% on average. Under the pessimistic hypothesis (RCP 8.5), the average  annual discharge should decrease by more than 17%. On a monthly basis, flows in  August and September would increase by more than 80% and those in October and November  would increase by more than 20% in both RCP scenarios.

section_content: Management and water supply remain a major challenge for the Ivorian government. At present, the water needs of the Ivorian populations have increased, in particular those of the autonomous district of Abidjan. A deficit of 58 million m 3 /year must be mobilized to meet the water needs of this population (Ehouman et al., 2017). With a view to filling the water deficit in the economic capital Abidjan, it was decided to operate the Aghien lagoon located north of this city. 

However, this resource could be impacted by climate change that influences the water balance by altering evapotranspiration rate, temperature, and precipitation (Abdelkrim, 2013). Change of these hydrological variables will have a negative impact on the availability of water resources in West Africa (Kouakou et al., 2012; Servat et al., 1998) as well as in the rest of the world. Water resources of Côte d'Ivoire, a country in West Africa, will not escape the consequences of this phenomenon caused by the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Indeed, studies have shown that the flow rates of some main rivers, in particular, the flows of the Bandama and Sassandra rivers will decrease during the 21st century (Goula et al., 2006; Soro et al., 2017). What would be the case for the Aghien lagoon? For a better understanding of the effects of climate change on the future quantitative availability of this lagoon, the Soil and Water Assessment Tools (SWAT) hydrological model was applied to its basin to simulate the flow over the periods 1960-1981, 2035-2056 (horizon 2040), 2057-2078 (horizon 2060) and 2079-2100 (horizon 2080). The robustness of the SWAT model to the flow in Ivorian context has been demonstrated simulate on the basin of Buyo (Koua, 2014) and of Taabo (Anoh, 2014).
section_name: Introduction

section_content: The Aghien basin is located in the southeastern part in Côte d'Ivoire, in the north of economical capital Abidjan. It is a subwatershed of the Me River basin. 

The basin area of this river is 4140 km 2 (Figure 1 ). The Aghien basin has a surface area of approximately 365 km 2 and lies between 3˚49'W and 3˚58'W longitude and 5˚21'N and 5˚28'N latitude. The main tributaries of lagoon Aghien are Me river, Djbi and Bété rivers. The Aghien area belongs to the equatorial transition climate. It is characterized by two wet periods (May to July and October to November) and two dry periods (December to April and August to September). 

The average annual rainfall of the study area is about 1500 mm and average annual air temperature range from 23˚C to 28. 5˚C. The vegetation on the borders of the Aghien lagoon is mainly dominated by Swamp forest composed of mangroves and bamboos. This vegetation plays an important role in the stability of
section_name: Study Area

section_name: Materials and Methods

section_name: Materials

section_content: The digital elevation model (DEM) was downloaded from the shuttle radar topography mission (STRM) website (http://srtm. csi. cgiar. org/SELECTION/inputCoord. asp). It allowed to delineate the watershed, the sub-basins and to calculate slopes and to extract stream network.
section_name: Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Data

section_content: The Aghien Lagoon Basin land cover map (Figure 2 ) made from Land SAT Oli-Tirs image under Envi 5. 1 (https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=OAtIh_5qUv8 (use to
section_name: Land Use Data

section_content: The soil map used in this article is that of FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), established in 1995 at the scale 1/5,000,000 for all Africa. It takes into account 5000 soil types and includes the physicochemical properties of soils made by Reynolds et al. (1999) for all Africa. These are essential for the implementation of the SWAT model. The soil data to be integrated into SWAT are: the texture, the available water content, the hydraulic conductivity, the apparent density, the organic carbon content of the different soil layers. SWAT soil data from the study area were automatically extracted from FAO soil data. To do this, we have established a correspondence between the soil types (moderately and strongly desatured Ferralitic soil and hydromorphic soil) of the Aghien lagoon basin and that of the ArcSwat database in which the values of the physicochemical parameters of the soils used by SWAT are recorded. This correspondence allowed to obtain three types of SWAT soils for the Aghien lagoon basin (Figure 3 ) which are representative of the types and characteristics of the soil of the zone.
section_name: Soil Map and Soil Type Data

section_content: Meteorological data are extracted from the SIEREM database (http://www. hydrosciences. fr/sierem). These data include precipitation and maximum and minimum temperatures at the daily time step and cover the period from 1951 to 1998, which is 47 years. With no data from stations in Aghien Lagoon Basin, we selected SIEREM stations near the Aghien lagoon watershed (Figure 4 ) to simulate the flow in this basin. These are the Azaguié, Banco and Bingerville stations., 2004). This method is developed under "extension analyse tools, Proximity, create Thiessen polygons of arc-gis 10. 2" (http://www. esri. com).
section_name: Weather Data

section_content: These are daily discharge daily data from the database of Hydrosciences Montpellier (HSM). These data cover the period 1957-1993. It should be noted that they were provided to them by the Water Directorate of Côte d'Ivoire and were recorded at the gauging station of Grand Alépé (Figure 4 ). The availability of discharge data is shown in Table 1.
section_name: Discharge Data

section_content: Ten global climate models (GCM) of the CORDEX-AFRICA project under two CMIP5 scenarios (RCP4. 5 and RCP 8. 5) were considered in this study. These models are presented in Table 2. The variables available in daily under the RCP4. 5 and RCP8. 5 scenarios are: precipitation, maximum and minimum temperatures, potential evapotranspiration. The outputs of these models cover the period from 1951 to 2100. This period is divided in two: 1951-2005 for historical data and 2006-2100 for future data. RCP 4. 5 is a scenario that simulates an increase in the radiative forcing to reach a maximum around 2100 before stabilizing. Under this scenario, greenhouse gas (GES) emissions will peak around 2040, then decline and stabilize around 2080. RCP 4. 5 is close to the SRES B1 marker scenario (Van Vuuren et al., 2011). Contrariwise the RCP 8. 5 simulates a constant increase in radiative forcing to reach 8. 5 W/m 2 in 2100 without reaching a maximum. It is close to the SRES A2 marker scenario (Riahi et al., 2011). RCP 8. 5 is the most pessimistic.
section_name: Future Climate Data

section_name: Methods

section_content: The assessment of the performance of the models to reproduce the two most influential parameters of the hydrological cycle (observed temperature and rainfall), was carried out using the bias method (Sabrina, 2015). This method consists to estimating the difference in between simulated (X sim ) and observed (X obs ) parameters compared to those observed over the 1960-1981 reference period (Equation ( 1 )). It is therefore a "relative difference". It makes it possible to evaluate the difference between rainfall and simulated temperatures at the observations. Table 1. Availability of discharge measurements. Since the SWAT hydrological model simulation is carried out at the monthly time step in this study, the global climate models selected are the ones that best simulate the observations at the seasonal scale. Thus, the performing models selected following the analysis of the observed and simulated data are recorded in Table 3 below. 

Affected of bias more or less importantly, the raw outputs of these models must be accompanied by bias correction methods (Paturel, 2014). Thus, the delta method (Ducharne et al., 2003) was required in this study to correct the bias of the selected climate models. This approach corrects two types of distributions:

• "multiplicative" disturbances for the precipitations ( )

,,,,,, scen j h obs j scen m h ref m

T obs,j and P obs,j are the daily observed temperature and precipitation; T scen,m,h and P scen,m,h are the mean monthly temperatures and precipitation simulated by the models over the period of the scenario considered; T ref,m, P ref,m are the mean monthly temperatures and precipitation over the reference period. T scen,j,h and P scen,j,h are the daily temperature and precipitation of the considered time period.
section_name: Evaluation of the Performance of Climate Models

section_content: SWAT "Soil and Water Assessment Tool" is a semi-distributed physically-based model, developed to predict the impact of management practices on water and agricultural chemical yields on a basin scale (Arnold et al., 1998). It has developed by researchers at the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture)-Agricultural Research Service (Ogden et al., 2001; Neitsch et al., 2005). 

SWAT takes into account all the hydrologic cycle, represented in the watershed, so spatialized. The time step used for analysis is the day. SWAT can analyze the impacts of climate, soil, vegetation and agricultural activities on water flow. The basic space unit at SWAT calculations is the Hydrological Response Unit (HRU). 

It is the result of the combination of a soil type, a land use class and a subwatershed. It is coupled with a GIS (geographic information system) such as Arc-View GIS 3. 2 or Arcgis 9. x. or Arcgis 10. x from ESRI. This has a double interest. 

Indeed, the use of a GIS makes it possible both to facilitate the pretreatment of the data to be integrated into the model and also to visualize the results of the simulation. Its implementation requires several input data: digital elevation model (DEM), soil data, weather data, land use data, agricultural practice etc. 

SWAT, subdivides hydrological modeling of the watershed into two phases (Neitsch et al., 2005) : the land phase and routing phase. The land phase is based on soil water balance equation for each day of simulation (4):

( )

where: SW t is the final soil water content (mm); SW 0 is the initial soil water content on day i (mm); t is the time (days); R day is amount of precipitation on day i (mm); Q surf is the amount of surface runoff on day i (mm), E a is the amount of evaporation on day i (mm); W seep is the amount of water entering the vadose zone from the soil profile on day i (mm); Q gw is the amount of return flow on day i (mm).
section_name: Hydrological Model: SWAT 1) SWAT model description

section_content: The Aghien lagoon basin is an ungauged basin. However, as shown in Figure 1
section_name: 2) Calibration and validation of SWAT model

section_content: Rainfall and temperature data of the six climate models selected for the RCP 4. 5

Figure 9. Reduced centered index on precipitation and calibration-validation period retained.
section_name: Climate Change Simulations

section_name: Results and Discussion

section_name: Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Precipitation and Potential Evapotranspiration of Aghien Lagoon Basin

section_content: PET shows an overall increasing trend in the 21st century under the RCP 4. 5 and RCP 8. 5 scenarios. Indeed, trends are becoming more pronounced under both scenarios, towards the end of the 21st century (Table 4 ), but also a slight stationarity of the PET is observed under the RCP 8. 5 scenario between the 2060 and 2080 horizons.
section_name: Change in Potential Evapotranspiration (PET)

section_content: The evolution of precipitation at different horizons is shown in Figure 10. The rates of decrease in rainfall are relatively more in RCP 8. 5 than RCP 4. 5 over the basin. Under RCP 4. 5, the rainfall may decrease from 9. 06% on average and under RCP 8. 5 rainfall may decrease from 16. 96% on average in future periods. The calculated rates of change are shown in Table 5 below. The decrease in precipitation is more pronounced towards the end of the century under the two scenarios:

Table 4. Percentage change in the annual evapotranspiration potential for the different horizons compared the baseline period. et al., 2015) and (Soro et al., 2017). Also, the work of (Koua, 2014). We note that under both scenarios, the hydrological regime could be disrupted with respect to seasonal flow patterns and the date of occurrence of flood peaks. Indeed, the flood peaks will now appear in August and September instead of June and July over the past period. This situation means that the seasons (May to July). Both scenarios predict a greater increase in flow (more than 80%)

in August and September during the short dry season and a slight increase in flow (more than 20%) in October and November during the short rainy season. 

The discharge of the Aghien lagoon would decrease by an average of 9. 42% under the RCP 4. 5 scenario and would also decrease by an average of 18. 24% under the RCP 8. 5 scenario. These results are in agreement with those of (Ardoin- Bardin, 2004) in the watersheds of Senegal, Gambia and Sassandra (Biao, 2017) in the Ouémé river basin in Benin (West Africa) (Koua, 2014) in the watershed of the Buyo dam or (Kouakou et al., 2012) in the Comoé river watershed. 

These authors describe a decrease in stream flows in these different basins, up to about 20% under the influence of climate change.
section_name: Change in Rainfall

section_content: This study evaluates the impact of climate change on the flow of the Aghien lagoon. Six climate models (CNRM, MIROC, HadGEM2, IPSLCM5, MPI and Ec-EARTH) of the CORDEX-AFRICA project under the scenarios RCP 4. 5 and RCP 8. 5 were used for the assessment of the impact of climate change. The SWAT hydrological model is used to simulate the hydrological processes in the Aghien lagoon watershed. Calibration and validation results for the Me basin showed a good performance of the SWAT model in the simulation of hydrological processes. Considering the geographical proximity and the hydrogeological, climatic and pedological similarities of the Aghien lagoon basin and the Mé watershed, the SWAT model was therefore applied with confidence on the Aghien lagoon basin to simulate the future evolutions of the PET, the precipitation and the flow of the Aghien lagoon in a context of climate change. The results indicate an increase in future PET of the order of 7% to 12% while precipitation is expected to decrease on average by more than 16% under RCP 8. 5% and 10% under RCP 4. 5. Like precipitation, the annual of the Aghien lagoon would decrease under the two RCP scenarios. The annual discharge should decrease by an average of 10% under RCP 4. 5 and more than 17% under RCP 8. 5. The scenarios also project a decrease in the seasonal flow of the lagoon. Under the RCP 4. 5 scenario, a 42% decrease in discharge during the dry period (December to April) and 57% during the wet period (July to May) is projected. Under the RCP 8. 5 scenario, a 44% decrease in flow in the dry period and 64% in the wet season is expected. However, the flow should increase by more than 80% in August and September (dry period) and by more than 20% in October and November (wet period) over the 2040, 2060 and 2080 horizons. It should be kept in mind that this is modeling that implements a hydrological model and the average of six climate models that involve uncertainties. Given these uncertainties, the results of this study are not forecasts, but projections of two possible future situations and equiprobable to the 2040, 2060 and 2080 horizons. Thus, taking into account the potential impact of climate change on the future evolution of the Aghien lagoon will reinforce the planning and management policy of this water resource, which will have to be adjusted according to observed or foreseeable uses.
section_name: Conclusion

section_name: Acknowledgements

section_content: This reflection received financial support from the ERASMUS MUNDUS program through the KITE (Knowledge Integration and Transparency in Education ) mobility project. All our gratitude to the authorities of this program. We would like to express our gratitude to Professor Séverin Pistre, professor of hydrogeology at the University of Montpellier, my academic supervisor of KITE program for his constructive suggestions and as well its collaborators who gave me the datasets that made this study possible. Finally, we would like to pay a final tribute to the professors Jourda Jean Patrice and KouaméKan of the Félix Houphouët Boigny University who agreed respectively to be Director and co-director of my thesis project.
section_name: Acknowledgements

section_name: Conflicts of Interest

section_content: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.
section_name: Conflicts of Interest