Trends of Rainfall and Temperature over North-Eastern Nigeria (1949-2014)

Climate change has the propensity to alter rainfall and temperature regimes across the world, including Nigeria. This paper investigated the trends of rainfall and temperature in northeastern parts of Nigeria, based on data obtained from Nigeria Meteorological Agency for the period of 66 years (1949-2014). The Statistical techniques used for analysis are Mann-Kendall’s test for trend, descriptive statistics, time-series plots and correlation analysis. The analyses performed involve the use of XLSTAT 2016 and Excel 2007. Results show a decreasing trend in annual total rainfall over both a long-term period (1949-2014) and a first short-term period (1949-1981), while a positive trend for the second short-term period (1982-2014) has been observed. The temperature on the other hand, showed an increasing trend over all the 3 periods especially the long-term period (1949-2014) which shows positive trends ranging from 0.04 °C/decade at Ibi to 0.09 °C/decade at Bauchi, with high level of significance at 0.001. Therefore, it concludes that temperature has increased over long and short periods while rainfall has increased only in the most recent period (1982-2014).