Hodo Abdilahi - MS Civil Engineering Student (Hydrology), Turkey
Rising temperatures and reducing precipitation due to climate change are a major problem among societies and governments around the world. Precipitation is the fundamental component of the hydrological cycle, which
directly affects water resources, influencing stream flow, soil moisture and groundwater reserves. Temperature is also one of the important indicators of climate change of water resources. This study aims to determine trends of monthly and annual precipitation data of Somalia, one of the countries most affected by climate change and located in Africa. For this purpose, 10 meteorological stations with 50 years of daily rainfall data have been used during the period (1968-2018). Variations of rainfall were found in every month in all stations, for this purpose, precipitation data of some stations in Somalia will be used. In this study Autocorrelation and Mann–Kendall tests were utilized to detect possible trends, in addition, also linear slopes were calculated with Sen's trend slope method to determine the magnitude of change over the entire time series. The application of a trend detection framework resulted in the differentiation of some significant trends, especially some stations rainfall trends decreasing (march to June) due to the increase of temperature. A noticeable decrease in the annual mean precipitation was observed mostly in north regions of Somalia as well as northeastern regions of Somalia. Regional average series also displayed trends similar to those for individual stations. And the conclusions of this study indicated that especially the North regions of Somalia and northeastern regions are affected by climate change by decreasing precipitation and increasing temperatures.