Estimation of Sea Level Rise on the West African Coasts: Case of Senegal, Mauritania and Cape Verde

Abstract

The advent of technology in the world has led to enormous, varying economic and social changes. Those changes have influenced the climate balance, which leads to global temperature rise, hence oceanic expansion and melting glaciers. These various phenomena caused the variation in the mean sea level. Thus, in this study we have evaluated that variation from the instrumental recordings of the tide gauges available in the region, which led us to choose the tide gauges of Dakar (Senegal), Nouakchott (Mauritania) and Palmeira (Cape Verde). The analysis of the tidal series began with the test of presence or absence of significant trends in the series using the Man-Kendall method followed by the decomposition of these series using the SSA, ARIMA and SLT techniques, which would result in the trend, seasonality and residues. The results of this analysis show a variation of 1.52 mm/year, 4.51 mm/year and 20.08 mm/year respectively for the Dakar, Palmeira and Nouakchott tide gauges.