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West Africa plays key roles in global climate and shows one of the strongest variations in hydro-climatic conditions. As it turns out, the region appears to be underrepresented in the existing compendium of Earth science and hydrology-focused journal papers when it comes to significant discussion on terrestrial hydrology and freshwater science. This prominent gap is largely precipitated by increasing number of constraints that include lack of considerable and robust investments in gauge measurements for meteorological and hydrological applications, poor funding of research institutions and other disincentives, among other factors. In this manuscript, the challenges and problems in large-scale terrestrial hydrology-focused investigation in West Africa are reviewed. Using a dossier of some recent contributions in the field of remote sensing hydrology, this review also highlights some of the progress in terrestrial hydrology and the opportunities that exist for hydro-geodetic research in West Africa that leverage on sustained investments in satellite geodetic missions. It is noted that West Africa is still a pristine environment for hydrology-focused research and can benefit from recent advancements in sophisticated space agency programs such as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, which undoubtedly has revolutionized terrestrial hydrology research around the world for nearly two decades. Given the poor density of gauge stations and limited ground observations, hydrological research in West Africa is expected to benefit more from independent space observations and multi-resolution data. This is because the lack of sufficient in-situ data for the parameterizations and adequate initialization of outputs from hydrological models and reanalysis data for hydrological applications results in poor representation of the West African land surface and hydrological state variables. To further improve our contemporary understanding of West Africa's terrestrial hydrology, the continued evaluation/validation of these observations and space-borne measurements is advocated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to analyse, for the Senegal River basin, the evolution of four classes of daily precipitation, the number of rainy days and the duration of the rainy season. The approach is to apply statistical tests of homogeneity to the series of annual rainfall over the period 1950–1998 to detect abrupt changes and to characterize the evolution of these six variables on each side of the change dates. The time series present an abrupt change (break) between 1966 and 1970. Deficits of rainy days in the period after the break compared to before vary between 6.2% at Kédougou and 38.6% at Saint Louis. The class of rain of more than 50 mm (P4) has the largest deficit, ranging from 14.8% at Mamou station to 66.6% at Nioro du Sahel.Editeur Z. W. Kundzewicz; Edithur Associé E. Gargouri [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]