Comparison of climate change impacts on the recharge of two karst systems computing different modelling approaches

Karst systems constitute aquifers in which infiltration and groundwater flows are generally complex processes and are characterized by limited knowledge in terms of geometry and structure. Nonetheless, they often represent interesting groundwater resources, some of them being subjected to intensive exploitation and others non exploited due to their poor understanding. In the future, it is likely that climate change impact on water resources will increase the interest for such a kind of aquifers due to their strong infiltration and storage capacity, in a broad context of higher water scarcity. The Lez and the Lison karst systems in Southern and Eastern France, respectively, provide 2 examples of such systems of several km² under two contrasted climate conditions, the first one being heavily exploited. This study presents a comparative climate change assessment on both karst systems. Nine climate scenarios corresponding to the Fourth assessment report of the IPCC (SRES A1B scenario), downscaled using weather-type methods by the CERFACS, have been applied to various recharge modelling approaches, as standard analytical solutions of recharge estimation and soil-water balance models. Results are compared and discussed in order to assess the influence on climate change impacts of i) the climate conditions (geographic location), ii) the groundwater exploitation and iii) the modelling approach.