CHARACTERIZATION OF THE TEMPORAL VARIABILITY OF RAINFALL IN SENEGAL (WEST AFRICA)

The wet years of the 1990s have reduced the extent of the area affected by drought. But studies have shown that the rainfall deficit persisted in the Sahelian regions until the end of the 1990s. P. OZER et al., in 2003, thought that the continuity of the drought, or on the contrary the identification of a rainfall break towards weather conditions, could be verified statistically only after ten more years of data. This is the context in which the present work is conducted. It aims to analyze the recent trend of annual rainfall series of 22 stations on Senegalese territory, with data collected through 2013, to see whether the drought persists or not. These data cover the period from 1940 to 2013 and the approach includes the following: (1) review and standardization of data, (2) calculation of rain standardized indices, (3) break and trends detection in annual rainfall series by applying three rupture tests (PETTITT, LEE and HEGHINIAN, HUBERT). The applying of these tests to the rain standarddized indices that was calculated from all stations and from stations grouped according to three climatic regions (South-Sahelian, South-Sudanian and North-Sudanian) highlights two rupture dates (signifycant at 1 % according to STUDENT's t test). The first break ranges out between 1967 and 1969, and the second one occurs between 1986 and 1998 according to the test of PETTITT and between 1992 and 2007 according to the method of LEE and HEGHINIAN and that of HUBERT. By analyzing each station, we notice that the second break in rainfall series occurs generally between 1998 and 2002. Only the HUBERT segmentation method doesn't always detect a second break, but the lack of detection covers only 18 % of the stations. So we identify a discontinuity towards wet conditions from 1998 (PETTITT) or 2003 (LEE and HEGHINIAN; HUBERT) even though the annual rainfalls remain lower than pre 1970.