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Nour-Eddine Laftouhi, Cadi Ayyad University - Morocco (Morocco)
Younes Moundi , Cadi Ayyad University - Morocco (Morocco)
Kamal Taj-Eddine, Cadi Ayyad University - Morocco (Morocco)
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Nowadays, water resources management is an important point to consider for minimizing losses and non-productive uses of water. here a deep knowledge of different elements constituting both the water balance sheet and the hydrogeological processes is necessary, i.e., the resource and demand, their spatial and temporal distribution, their quality, losses, their impact on water quality, and all human actions that can have an influence on the water balance sheet.
Tensift region knows an important population growth, and as the water in this region is scarce, the optimization of the water management system is of great importance. In Marrakech - major Moroccan city located in the Tensift region - and its surroundings, water supply is provided by two dams located in the Atlas and by the Atlas Rivers.
Therefore, our current work concerns the area of Tensift watershed and aims at characterizing hydrological functioning of this area, the different components involved in the water cycle and their dynamics. This is very important for the hydrological regime modelling and the prediction of system response to eventual climate changes and land use patterns. In fact, 'less rainfall thus less flow' being the overall long-term trend, does not summarized the climatic change: the variation of precipitations is also accompanied by a thermal regime variation. the basin's response to a forcing regime change becomes much more complex than the simple decline noticed, this is mainly due to interactions of many processes (evapotranspiration, surface flow, snowmelt, sublimation,...) and tanks (rain, snow, soil, aquifers,...) occurring in a semi-arid watershed.
For these reasons, the hydrological model CEQUEAU was selected; it offers a semi distributed hydrological modelling of the watershed at a daily time step. And when it is coupled with a Geographic Information System ("GIS"), the pre-treatment of topographical data is possible, the design of input files and the spatial visualization of outputs is also facilitated. Thus, this hydrological model would predict the effects of land use and climate changes on the hydrological cycle and the water quality of a watershed.
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