| Abstract: | Abstract The drought event which reached severe levels in 1972 and 1973 caused a major disaster in the Sahalian and sub-Sahalian zones in Africa. This disaster has drawn attention to the need for data surveys and detailed studies for meaningful long-term measures to combat the effects of future droughts. The study reported in this paper is an attempt to assess the hydrological aspects of the drought event in Nigeria in 1972 and 1973. There exist relatively long and reliable records of rainfall within the drought zone, while records for runoff, water level and groundwater are few and far between. Data available are analysed to determine evidence of trend and persistence (short and long-term). An examination of the rainfall records showed that extreme dry years at all the stations tended to recur at about the same time. The time interval between these extreme dry years was about 30 years. It was also observed from the spectral analysis of the records that most of the spectra for all the stations showed a generally high level of variance at low frequency. The limited information on runoff and groundwater precludes a detailed statistical analysis from being carried out on the annual series of runoff. However, the runoff data at some stations snowed that the magnitude of runoff in the drought year 1972/1973 was about 22–72 per cent of the average value for the length of record available (about eight years). Moreover, the long-term water-level record of Lake Chad revealed a similar trend for the occurrence of extreme dry years to that observed in the rainfall record. |
