Assessing the Long-Term Changes in Selected Meteorological Parameters over the North-Rift, Kenya: A Regional Climatology Perspective

Abstract

Understanding long-term trends in climatic variables is essential for assessing climate change impacts on regional ecosystems and human livelihoods. A regional analysis of climatic variables over some domains is inevitable due to their geographical location and importance to the agricultural sector. Due to the aforementioned demands, the current study analyzes, trends in precipitation (from Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS)), and minimum and maximum temperatures (from TerraClimate) over the North-Rift region of Kenya for over thirty (30) years using satellite data. The seasonal decomposition analysis was performed for each variable to explore the trends and residual components. The findings by the current study indicate that most counties, have experienced enhance precipitation which corresponds to a declining diurnal temperature from 2019 onwards. The seasonality component reveals repeated patterns or variations occurring at steady intervals within each region's data, hence suggesting a distinct regional seasonal trend in the selected meteorological parameters over time. Basically, all counties have reported a relatively constant variability in both maximum and minimum temperatures during the study period except from 2017 onwards where significant variability in the two properties is recorded. In conclusion, the foregoing results that the selected climatic variables exhibit significant spatiotemporal and interannual variability.