SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF CLIMATE PARAMETERS AND TREND PATTERN ANALYSES ACROSS THE SOUTH EASTERN PART OF NIGER STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The magnitude of climate variability varies according to location. Hence, examining the spatiotemporal dynamics of meteorological variables in the context of climate change which have influence on the agricultural, social economy activities of human lives is imperatives. This study thus seeks to present the spatial distributions of climate parameters (temperature, precipitation, surface pressure and wind speed) and trend pattern analyses across the nine local government areas (LGAs) in the eastern part of Niger state using Mann-kendell and Sen’s slope statistical test. Merra2 meteorological dataset is processed directly from the National Aeronautical Space Administration (NASA) in affiliation with global modelling Assimilation office using the principles of retrospective analysis in refining earth data. The climate data (Merra2) covered the range of ten years (2010-2019), which was further filtered and sorted before been used. The Merra2 was validated using Nigeria Meteorology Agency (NiMET) dataset and it indicated that there was a strongly correlation with the climate parameters dataset apart from wind speed (WS) which had a poor correlation. The trend pattern analyses were computed for the ten years using Mann-Kendall and Sen’s slope estimator statistical template at the 95% confidence level. Temperature (T), precipitation (P) and WS indicated a negative trend pattern while surface pressure (SP) indicated positive trend pattern for the study area. This might lead to unexpected changes in the weather conditions and subsequently have extended effect on the social and economic activities in the study area. Therefore, further study should be carried out to investigate such situation in order to provide adopted strategies to mitigate the extended effect.