An experiment in intra‐seasonal agricultural drought monitoring and early warning in the Sudano‐Sahelian Belt of Nigeria

Abstract

The highly variable rainfall and recurring drought in dry sub-humid and semi-arid regions constitute a major socio-economic problem that influences people's livelihoods. Agricultural drought is the most common of all drought types and is the most challenging to track and forecast owing to its ease of occurrence and impact on socio-economic sustainability. In Nigeria as is the case in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, drought frequency, intensity and effect have dominated the literature since the great Sahelian drought of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This study proposes a simple drought monitoring and early warning (EW) methodology based on an experiment over Kano, Nigeria, hinged on an Intraseasonal Rainfall Monitoring Index (IRMI, Usman and Abdulkadir, 2012) determined for each pentad, using daily rainfall totals for a period of 30 years. The onset dates and drought intensity levels were used to define EW statements at three levels: advisory, alert and emergency. An experimental application of the scheme identified and detected late initiation conditions of real monsoon onset (RMO) in those seasons that eventually witnessed disastrous rainfall situations. Generally, the result reveals that the years between 1970 and 1990 over Kano, Nigeria, which ended as years of severe drought or worse, showed enough signals of poor rainfall distribution (deficient moisture) at the beginning for the scheme to have enabled a very high degree of forecast accuracy. It is concluded that strict monitoring of the rainfall regime especially during its onset phase is capable of revealing danger signals in the rainfall regime early enough to enable mitigation. Such mitigation is critical for the management of agricultural productivity in the predominantly rainfall-dependent farming systems in the Sudan-Sahel zone as confirmed by earlier studies.

Impacts of variability and change in rainfall on gender of farmers in Anambra, Southeast Nigeria

“…Although crop and livestock production provides employment and are major sources of income for many people in Nigeria, prolonged dry spells have become much more common in recent years, characterized by low crop yields, poor nutrition and death of livestock (Adegboyega et al.,2016). Multi-year droughts are now common which some scientists perceive to be a transitional phase in climate change (Ezeh et al., 2016; Usman and AbdulKadir, 2014). Previous study concluded that annual rainfall has reduced significantly over 20% of the landscape and the amount of annual rainfall reduced by 50–350 mm in 64% portion of Nigeria (Ogungbenro and Morakinyo, 2014).…”

Trend Analysis of Droughts during Crop Growing Seasons of Nigeria

“…The numerous studies that have been conducted on droughts in Nigeria over the last 40 years have used different indices [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. However, without any indication of agricultural drought risk considering varying cropping periods, these studies attempted to characterize droughts generally.…”

Projection of meteorological droughts in Nigeria during growing seasons under climate change scenarios

“…Studies reported more erratic behaviour of climate due to climate change, and thus, potentially increase its severity in different countries including Nigeria 9,27,28 . Numerous studies on the variability of climate and the changing nature of droughts using various indices have been conducted in Nigeria 3,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] . Though major drought events have not occurred in Nigeria for the past decades, studies showed an increasing tendency in climate variability, and thus, potential increase in drought frequency and affected areas [40][41][42] .…”