Analysis of rainfall data of some West African countries using wavelet transform and nonlinear time series techniques.

The chaotic behaviour of monthly rainfall data of Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo between January 1901 and December 2015 were investigated using wavelet transformation analysis and time series techniques. Wavelet power spectrum was used to split the time series into different scales. Power concentrations between 8 and 16 months were observed for the selected locations. The embedding dimension, delay and largest Lyapunov exponent (LE) were calculated. We observed positive LE ranging from 0.13 to 0.36, indicating the rainfall was chaotic. Ghana had the highest values of LE, while the lowest LE was observed at Niger.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]