In the West African Sahel, two paradoxical hydrological behaviors have occurred during the last five decades. The first paradox was observed during the 1968–1990s ‘Great Drought’ period, during which runoff significantly increased. The second paradox appeared during the subsequent period of rainfall recovery (i.e., since the 1990s), during which the runoff coefficient continued to increase despite the general re-greening of the Sahel. This paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on the drivers of these paradoxical behaviors, focusing on recent works in the West African Sahelo/Sudanian strip, and upscaling the hydrological processes through an analysis of recent data from two representative areas of this region. This paper helps better determine the respective roles played by Land Use/Land Cover Changes (LULCC), the evolution of rainfall intensity and the occurrence of extreme rainfall events in these hydrological paradoxes. Both the literature review and recent data converge in indicating that the first Sahelian hydrological paradox was mostly driven by LULCC, while the second paradox has been caused by both LULCC and climate evolution, mainly the recent increase in rainfall intensity.

The African continent is probably the one with the lowest density of hydrometric stations currently measuring river discharge despite the fact that the number of operating stations was quite important until the 1970s. This new African Database of Hydrometric Indices (ADHI) provides a wide range of hydrometric indices and hydrological signatures computed from different sources of data after a quality control. It includes 1466 stations with at least 10 years of daily discharge data over the period 1950–2018. The average record length is 33 years, and 131 stations have complete records over 50 years. With this new dataset spanning most climatic regions of the African continent, several hydrometric indices have been computed, representing mean flow characteristics and extremes (low flows and floods), and are accessible to the scientific community. The database will be updated on a regular basis to include more hydrometric stations and longer time series of river discharge. The ADHI is available for download at: https://doi.org/10.23708/LXGXQ9 (Tramblay and Rouché, 2020).

L’Afrique de l’ouest est relativement peu dotée en grandes infrastructures hydrauliques capables de satisfaire les demandes. Les cultivateurs, trop dépendants des aléas climatiques, réclament l’irrigation. Les consommateurs veulent du riz, qu’il faut irriguer. Les populations sont encore mal desservies en eau potable et le coût de l’énergie appelle à la mise en valeur du potentiel hydroélectrique. Les décideurs nationaux et internationaux sont bien déterminés à relancer les grands projets hydrauliques, mais la régulation des débits des fleuves va nécessiter des négociations serrées entre États à l’échelle des bassins hydrographiques dans le cadre des organisations de bassins mais aussi dans le cadre des accords énergétiques notamment entre les États de la Communauté économique des États d’Afrique de l’Ouest (CEDEAO). Les négociations vont nécessiter des compromis importants, surtout en ce qui concerne les zones humides, déjà en voie d’assèchement du fait de la baisse des pluies et qui vont souffrir de la construction de nouveaux barrages.

The African continent has a very low density of rain gauge stations, and long time-series for recent years are often limited and poorly available. In the context of global change, it is very important to be able to characterize the spatio-temporal variability of past rainfall, on the basis of datasets issued from observations, to correctly validate simulations. The quality of the rainfall data is for instance of very high importance to improve the efficiency of the hydrological modeling, through calibration/validation experiments. The HydroSciences Montpellier Laboratory (HSM) has a long experience in collecting and managing hydro-climatological data. Thus, HSM had initiated a program to elaborate a reference dataset, in order to build monthly rainfall grids over the African continent, over a period of 60 years (1940/1999). The large quantity of data collected (about 7000 measurement points were used in this project) allowed for interpolation using only observed data, with no statistical use of a reference period. Compared to other databases that are used to build the grids of the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) or the Climatic Research Unit of University of East Anglia, UK (CRU), the number of available observational stations was significantly much higher, including the end of the century when the number of measurement stations dropped dramatically, everywhere. Inverse distance weighed (IDW) was the chosen method to build the 720 monthly grids and a mean annual grid, from rain gauges. The mean annual grid was compared to the CRU grid. The grids were significantly different in many places, especially in North Africa, Sahel, the horn of Africa, and the South Western coast of Africa, with HSM_SIEREM data (database HydroSciences Montpellier_Système d’Information Environnementales pour les Ressources en Eau et leur Modélisation) being closer to the observed rain gauge values. The quality of the grids computed was checked, following two approaches—cross-validation of the two interpolation methods, ordinary kriging and inverse distance weighting, which gave a comparable reliability, with regards to the observed data, long time-series analysis, and analysis of long-term signals over the continent, compared to previous studies. The statistical tests, computed on the observed and gridded data, detected a rupture in the rainfall regime around 1979/1980, on the scale of the whole continent; this was congruent with the results in the literature. At the monthly time-scale, the most widely observed signal over the period of 1940/1999, was a significant decrease of the austral rainy season between March and May, which has not earlier been well-documented. Thus, this would lead to a further detailed climatological study from this HSM_SIEREM database.

The Ouémé watersheds at Bétérou and Bonou has been recently facing increased sensitivity to extreme hydroclimatic phenomena that occurred by flooding or drought events. In the same time, the population growth and the related socio-economic activities increased the pressure state on water resources. In this context, hydrological modeling is an important issue and this study aims at analyzing the calibration of the hydrological model GR4J based on PET Penman-Monteith and Oudin methods. Daily rainfall, Penman-Monteith and Oudin evapotranspiration and daily data flow from the Bétérou and Bonou hydrometric stations on the Ouémé Basin have been implemented in the GR4J model over the period 1971 to 2010. Oudin PET values are slightly higher than the Penman-Monteith PET ones. However, the difference between the two PET methods have only few impacts on the optimization and performance criteria of the GR4J model. The Nash values ranges from 0.83 to 0.91 in Bonou, and 0.52 to 0.70 in Bétérou for the calibration in dry period, while in validation, they are 0.59 to 0.78 in Bétérou, and 0.56 to 0.88 in Bonou in wet season. In view of these results, with the two PET methods used which do not result from the same climatic variables, it should be said that the formulation of PET has only few impacts on the results of GR4J for these tropical basins.