Modelling West African Total Precipitation Depth: A Statistical Approach

Even though several reports over the past few decades indicate an increasing aridity over West Africa, attempts to establish the controlling factor(s) have not been successful. The traditional belief of the position of the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) as the predominant factor over the region has been refuted by recent findings. Changes in major atmospheric circulations such as African Easterly Jet (AEJ) and Tropical Easterly Jet (TEJ) are being cited as major precipitation driving forces over the region. Thus, any attempt to predict long term precipitation events over the region using Global Circulation or Local Circulation Models could be flawed as the controlling factors are not fully elucidated yet. Successful prediction effort may require models which depend on past events as their inputs as in the case of time series models such as Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. In this study, historical precipitation data was imported as time series data structure into an R programming language and was used to build appropriate Seasonal Multiplicative Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average model, ARIMA (p, d, q)*(P, D, Q). The model was then used to predict long term precipitation events over the Ghanaian segment of the Volta Basin which could be used in planning and implementation of development policies.