Recent assessment of West African summer monsoon daily rainfall trends

This study analyses observed spatial trends in the summer monsoon rainfall over West Africa from 1998 to 2013 using two gridded observation datasets. The trends are calculated with the Kendall's tau based slope estimator. Results show significant changes of the West African summer monsoon rainfall. Increases in the summer monsoon rainfall (measured as daily mean rainfall, frequency of wet days or extreme rainfall events) are observed over Sahel and decreases are observed along the Guinea Coast. Also, instead of the agreement between both observation datasets, they show some differences which can be attributed to the difference in their spatial resolution.