Trend Analysis of Temperature and Precipitation in Trarza Region of Mauritania

Abstract

Trend analysis of annual temperature and precipitation time series data collected from three stations (Boutilimit (station 1), Nouakchott (station 2) and Rosso (station 3)) has been used to detect the impacts of climate change on water resources in Trarza region, Mauritania. The Mann-Kendall, the Spearman's rho, and the Sen trend test were used for the trend identification. Pettitt's test was used to detect the change point of the series while the Theil-Sen approach was used to estimate the magnitude of the slope in the series. For precipitation, two stations (1 and 3) indicated statistically significant increase in trends. In the case of temperature, almost all the stations show statistically significant increasing trends in the maximum, minimum, and average temperatures. The magnitude of precipitation detected by the Theil-Sen test for stations 1 and 3, respectively, was found to be at the rate of 2.93 and 3.35 mm/year at 5% significance level. The magnitude trend of temperature detected by the Theil-Sen approach was found to be at the rate of 0.2-0.4 degrees C per decade for almost all the stations. The change points of temperature trends detected by Pettitt test are found to be in the same year (1995) for all the stations.