Abstract
The Republic of Djibouti has an area of 23,000 km2, a coastline 370 km long and a population of 820,000 inhabitants. It experiences an arid climate characterized by high daytime temperatures and low and irregular rainfall (average of 140 mm/year), resulting in continuous periods of drought. These difficult climatic conditions and the absence of perennial surface water have progressively led to an intensive exploitation of groundwater to meet increasing water demands in all sectors (drinking water, agriculture and industries). In coastal areas, seawater intrusion constitutes a significant additional risk of groundwater degradation. This study is focused on the coastal aquifer of Tadjourah which supplies water to the city of Tadjourah, currently comprising 21,000 inhabitants. The main objective of this work is to assess the current resources of this aquifer; its capacity to satisfy, or not, the projected water demands during coming years; and to analyze its vulnerability to seawater intrusion within the frame of climate change. Three RCPs (Representative Concentration Pathway) were used to simulate different climate scenarios up to 2100. The simulated rainfall series allowed to deduce the aquifer recharge up to 2100. The code Seawat was used to model seawater intrusion into the aquifer, using the recharge data deduced from the climate scenarios. The results indicate that the risk of contamination of the Tadjourah coastal aquifer by seawater intrusion is high. The long-term and sustainable exploitation of this aquifer must take into consideration the impact of climate change.
Highlights
Water resources in coastal aquifers are intensely exploited given the widespread social and economic development of coastal areas around the world [1]
The groundwater is of variable density, given the seawater intrusion
Vertical discretization is performed at a finer scale than horizontal discretization in order to correctly simulate seawater intrusion
Summary
Water resources in coastal aquifers are intensely exploited given the widespread social and economic development of coastal areas around the world [1]. In these coastal areas, groundwater is often the only water resource of acceptable quality. The most important consequence of any lack of management of these aquifers is the degradation of the quality of the underground resources due to excessive seawater intrusion.
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