Intrinsic properties of Sahel precipitation anomalies and rainfall

The estimation of the future projected precipitation and rainfall on short- and long-term basis is crucial because their substantial changes are closely associated with severe socioeconomic and ecological consequences. For this reason, the detrended fluctuation analysis is applied on the Sahel precipitation and standardized rainfall anomalies in order to explore the intrinsic properties of their temporal variability. The results obtained show that the Sahel precipitation anomalies the period 1900–2010 exhibit persistent long-range correlations for all the time lags between 4 months and 28 years. This result states that the fluctuations of the Sahel precipitation anomalies in small time intervals are positively correlated to those in longer time intervals in a power law fashion. In opposite, the Sahel standardized rainfall fluctuations during the periods 1948–2001 show an almost random walk behavior. It should be emphasized that these findings could substantially contribute to the precipitation forecast and the advanced simulation of the variability of the global climate system. For instance, the data of the precipitation forecast modeling must exhibit the long-range correlations dictated by the precipitation data in the past. A detailed analysis on this topic will be published elsewhere.