Comparing Africa's Regional Climate Trends

Africa's Regional Climate Trends

This project is a component of wider research to develop reliable and free-scale climate data for Africa.

This project focused on analyzing climate trends on the African continent by its regions. The regions were classified according to the climatic zones of bushveld, desert, equatorial, Mediterranean, savanna, steppe, and subtropical so as to illustrate and quantify the differences in climatic changes over the diverse planes of the continent over the years. We analyzed two climate variables of mean annual temperature (MAT) and total annual precipitation (TAP) using meteorological station data covering the period 1900 to 2022 for temperature and 1900 to 2010 for precipitation.

Meteorological station data was refined using software tools in R Statistics, Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS), and Microsoft Excel to produce data frames, maps, exploratory graphs, and statistical summaries to achieve the objective of this exercise.

The results of the study showed that there are variations between the MAT and TAP of the different climatic zones with varying degrees. The study also showed the regions with higher decadal temperature increases.

The finding of this study could inform more localized studies on the African continent as well as lay a basis for developing free scale climate data for Africa