Application of SWAT to Estimate Water Balance in the Aghien Lagoon Basin, South-East of Cote Divoire

Management and water supply remains a major challenge for the governments in Ivory Coast, that facing demographic pressure associated with an uncontrolled urbanization, the current drinking water sources in the economical capital have become insufficient. The Ivorian government decided to exploit the Aghien lagoon that will be in addition to existing water resources. This research aims at evaluating the performance of the SWAT model to simulate of surface runoff in the Aghien lagoon basin. The coefficient of determination (R2) and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) statistics were used to evaluate the model performance. It was found that the SWAT model can be successfully applied for hydrological evaluation of the Aghien basin. Values of NSE and R2 were greater than 0.5. The water balance analysis of the basin indicated that more than 57 % of losses in the watershed are through evapotranspiration.