– Climate Variability and Its Impact on Water Resources of Lower Kaduna River Catchment Nigeria –
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ABSTRACT
Climate Variability in Study Area, located between latitude 10° 15’ and 10° 45’ North and longitude 6° 15’ and 7° 45’ East with an area of 1647 square kilometers in Kaduna State and
within the Northern Guinea Savannah Climatic/Ecological zone and its Impacts on Water Resources of the Area were investigated in this report using 47years (1960-2006) record of hydro-meteorological data.
The Climate variability was evaluated using a simple approach which considered variability as the difference between the means and standard deviations of climatic elements of two equal -length time periods.
Other methods used include coefficient of variation, time series methods and anomaly approach. The impacts of climate variability on water resources of the study area were investigated using comparative and correlation analyses.
From the results, the hottest year within the zone was 1993 with day time temperature increase of 15.3℃ and a zonal average of 0.08℃, indicating warming while within the catchment, the highest increase in maximum temperature was 2.6℃.
The maximum increase in the minimum temperature was 8.2℃ in 1998 within the zone but 9.2℃ in the catchment area in 1979. The increase in the annual minimum temperature over the zone averaged 0.26℃, indicating warmer nights.
INTRODUCTION
Climate, in a narrow sense, is usually defined as the “average weather” or more rigorously, as the statistical description, in terms of the mean and variability, of meteorological variables (temperature, rainfall or precipitation, wind) over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years.
The traditional period is thirty (30) years as defined by World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 1988).
The climate of an observational site is usually described by the average values of relevant observations such as temperature, precipitation or wind.
Climate in a wider sense is the state of the global climate system including a statistical description of all the relevant meteorological variables.
The term weather describes the day-to-day and hour-to-hour changes in the atmospheric conditions at any given location.
Although the terms climate and weather are often used interchangeably, there is an important distinction. While weather describes the atmospheric conditions at a given time and place,
climate is the synthesis of the day-to-day variations into a set of average conditions based on statistical summary such as 30-year record of weather observations.
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