Monitoring Drought and Land Cover Change over the North Africa Using NASA MERRA2 Data Products

North Africa, and the Sahara desert in particular, are highly vulnerable to climate change, due to strong exposures to increasing temperature and precipitation variability. This project investigates the change in vegetation as a result of droughts in North Africa for the period ranging 1980-2019. North Africa includes the countries: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Western Sahara. Climate change is a big factor in affecting rainfall leading to more droughts, especially in North Africa. An increased temperature will lead to more precipitation falling as rain and increased evaporation and transpiration. Drought conditions result from a lack of precipitation and this has many effects on the surrounding land and weather conditions. This causes the grass and surrounding land to dry up. The effects of drought play a large role in the water supply to communities as well as damage to crops and other vegetation. Droughts decrease the resilience of vegetation. Using MERRA-2 data, the first long-term global reanalysis data product to assimilate space-based observations of climate data records in the climate system, we can analyze North Africa's monthly temperature, precipitation, NDVI, LAI, and AOD to identify land cover change in North Africa. The trends and variations of drought and land cover change are identified. We also assessed the El Nino events impacting on these trends and variations.

Keywords:

Climate change, extreme drought, land cover change, NASA data, temperature, precipitation, NDVI, LAI, AOD, and El Nino events.