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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Water
Sec. Water and Hydrocomplexity
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frwa.2024.1372333
This article is part of the Research Topic Climate, Water and Land in Africa: Research Trends and Challenges View all 3 articles

REGIONAL CLIMATE RESPONSE TO LAND COVER CHANGE IN TROPICAL WEST AFRICA: A NUMERICAL SENSITIVITY EXPERIMENT WITH ESA LAND COVER DATA AND ADVANCED WRF-HYDRO

Provisionally accepted
Eric M. Mortey Eric M. Mortey 1,2,3*Joel Arnault Joel Arnault 3,4Maman Maarouhi INOUSSA Maman Maarouhi INOUSSA 1Saïdou Madougou Saïdou Madougou 1Thompson Annor Thompson Annor 5Patrick Laux Patrick Laux 3,4Diarra Dieng Diarra Dieng 3Harald Kunstmann Harald Kunstmann 3,4
  • 1 Abdou Moumouni University, Niamey, Niger
  • 2 University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana
  • 3 Institute for Meteorology and Atmospheric Environmental Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
  • 4 University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany
  • 5 Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The response of regional climate models (RCMs) to different input land cover information is complex and uncertain. Several studies by the regional climate modeling community have investigated the potential of land cover data to help understand land-atmosphere interactions at regional and local scales. This study investigates the regional climate response to introducing European Space Agency (ESA) land cover (LC) data into WRF-Hydro. In addition, this study assesses the potential impacts of afforestation and deforestation strategies on regional water and energy fluxes. An extended version of WRF-Hydro that accounts for a two-way river-land water flow to reduce unrealistic peaks in simulated discharge was employed. The two-way river-land flow setup yielded a better NSE and KGE of 0.47 and 0.69, respectively, over the Kulpawn basin compared to the default setup values of -0.34 and 0.2. Two land use/land cover change effects were deduced from synthetic numerical sensitivity experiments mimicking afforestation by closed shrubland expansion and deforestation by cropland expansion. The afforestation experiment yielded approximately 6% more precipitation, 3% more evapotranspiration, 27% more surface runoff, and 16% more underground runoff, while the deforestation by cropland expansion yielded -5% less precipitation, -3% less evapotranspiration, -3% less surface runoff, and -9% less underground runoff over the Sissili-Kulpawn Basin (SKB). This result suggests that afforestation (deforestation) could increase the flood (drought) risk. Our synthetic numerical experiment mimics the regional water and energy budgets well and can help climate services and decision-makers by quantifying regional climate response to potential land cover changes.

    Keywords: Regional climate modeling, Afforestation, deforestation, WRF-Hydro, ESA CCI LC, Climate services, Land use land cover change, numerical modeling More specifically

    Received: 17 Jan 2024; Accepted: 13 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Mortey, Arnault, INOUSSA, Madougou, Annor, Laux, Dieng and Kunstmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Eric M. Mortey, Abdou Moumouni University, Niamey, 10896, Niger

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