Climate change impacts on the Water Highway project in Morocco
Name
hess-24-1467-2020.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.04 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f7529465aa1fa30a4313e4f0bb422f20
Author(s)
El Moçayd, Nabil
Kang, Suchul
Eltahir, Elfatih A. B.
Date Issued
March 2020
Journal
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
Publisher
Copernicus GmbH
Citation
El Moçayd, Nabil, Suchul Kang, and Elfatih A. B. Eltahir. "Climate change impacts on the Water Highways project in Morocco." Hydrology and Earth System Science, 24, 3 (March 2020), 1467-1483. © The Author(s) 2020.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The hydrology of Morocco is characterized by significant spatial variability. Precipitation follows a sharp gradient, decreasing from the north to the south. In order to redistribute the available water, a project has been proposed to transfer 860 × 106 m3 yr-1 from the wet north to the arid southern regions, namely the "Water Highway" project. The present study aims to address the viability of the project after accounting for the impacts of climate change in the watersheds located in the north. We perform regional climate model (RCM) simulations over the study region using boundary conditions from five different global circulation models (GCMs) and assuming two different emissions scenarios-RCP4.5 (with mitigation) and RCP8.5 (business as usual). The impact on precipitation and temperature are assessed, and the decrease in the available water quantity is estimated. Under RCP8.5, the project is likely not feasible. However, under the RCP4.5, a rescaled version of this project may be feasible depending on how much water is allocated to satisfy the local water demand in the north.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-1467-2020
