Trend Analysis of the Variations of Ambient Temperature Using Mann-Kendall Test and Sen's Estimate in Calabar, Southern Nigeria

Studies have been made to understand the fluctuations of temperature in regions around the world because of an ever changing variation due mostly to man's anthropogenic activities. This study is focused on analysing the temperature variations in Calabar, Southern Nigeria for 20 years (1998 – 2018) using the Mann-Kendall trend test and Sen's slope estimator. Results from the Mann-Kendall test shows that the annual trends of the maximum and average ambient temperature are both increasing after showing positive Kendall Z-values (1.04 and 0.10 respectively). The minimum ambient temperature annual trend was observed to be decreasing after having a negative Kendall Z-value (-0.32); the estimations from Sen's slope agreed with these results. The p-values were calculated to be 0.745, 0.299, and 0.922 for the minimum, maximum, and average ambient temperature trend respectively; these values were all found to be less than all significant levels used 0.1% (0.001), 1% (0.01), 5% (0.05), and 10% (0.1). This shows that the trends were not increasing or decreasing significantly, hence there is "no significant trend". This may be due to the almost unchanging weather condition in the region arising from its closeness to the Atlantic Ocean.