Ayanlade, Ayansina, Radeny, Maren, Morton, John F. ORCID: 0000-0002-8013-5794 and Muchaba, Tabitha (2018) Rainfall variability and drought characteristics in two agro-climatic zones: An assessment of climate change challenges in Africa. Science of the Total Environment, 630. pp. 728-737. ISSN 0048-9697 (doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.02.196)

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Abstract

This paper aims at examining drought characteristics as an evidence of climate change in two agro-climatic zones of Nigeria and farmers' perceptions of impacts and adaptation strategies. The results show high spatial and temporal rainfall variability for the stations, in consequence, there are several anomalies in rainfall in recent years but much more in the locations around the Guinea savanna. The inter-station and seasonality statistics reveal less variable and wetter early growing seasons and late growing seasons in the Rainforest zone, and more variable and drier growing seasons in other stations. The probability (p) of dry spells exceeding 3, 5 and 10 consecutive days is very high with 0.62≤p≥0.8 in all the stations, though, the p-values for 10day spells drop below 0.6 in Ibadan and Osogbo. The results further show that rainfall is much more reliable from the month of May until July with the coefficient of variance for rainy days <0.30, but less reliable in the months of March, August and October (CV-RD>0.30), though CV-RD appears higher in the month of August for all the stations. It is apparent that farmers' perceptions of drought fundamentally mirror climatic patterns from historical weather data. The study concludes that the adaptation facilities and equipment, hybrids of crops and animals are to be provided at a subsidized price by the government, for farmers to cope with the current condition of climate change.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Climate change; Drought characteristics; Perceptions of drought; Africa
Subjects:	S Agriculture > S Agriculture (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Engineering & Science Faculty of Engineering & Science > Natural Resources Institute Faculty of Engineering & Science > Natural Resources Institute > Development Studies Research Group Faculty of Engineering & Science > Natural Resources Institute > Livelihoods & Institutions Department
Last Modified:	03 Aug 2020 06:58
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/19399

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