Emmanuel Quansah

• Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) is a critical air pollutant and key indicator for air quality. Due to limited monitoring, we leveraged TROPOMI NO₂ and NASA POWER meteorological datasets to evaluate the meteorological drivers on NO₂ tropospheric column concentrations and to develop predictive models for NO₂ levels over Ghana. Employing an 8:2 ratio for model...

Extreme events like droughts frequently affect West Africa, known as the world’s centre for cocoa production. In Ghana and Togo, these extreme events negatively affect water supplies and agricultural land productivity, especially for cocoa. This study aims to create a cocoa drought vulnerability map that offers a clearer perspective of drought effe...

Cocoa is an important agricultural commodity and has significant economic and cultural value for millions of households worldwide, especially in West Africa, which accounts for about 70% of global production. In the green landscapes of Ghana and Togo, drought might have had a devastating effect on cocoa production, challenging the vitality and sust...

Citation: Attiogbé, A.A.C.; Nehren, U.; Quansah, E.; Bessah, E.; Salack, S.; Sogbedji, J.M.; Agodzo, S.K. Cocoa Farmers' Perceptions of Drought and Adaptive Strategies in the Ghana-Togo Transboundary Cocoa Belt. Land 2024, 13, 1737. https:// Abstract: This study investigated the perception of drought by cocoa farmers and explored the effectivenes...

Solar radiation measurements are needed to simulate a diverse range of clean energy application systems for optimization. However worldwide, whereas radiometric measurement stations are scarce and mostly sparsely distributed, satellite and reanalysis products are available, though with resolution problems. Therefore in the absence of in-situ measur...

Knowledge of the seasonal positioning of the Intertropical Discontinuity (ITD) is critical to understanding seasonal moist convective processes and associated rainfall over West Africa. This study constitutes a new analysis of the seasonality of moist convection over West Africa, relative to the ITD, based on NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AI...

The Ghana Meteorological Agency delineated Ghana’s geographical space into four agro-climatic zones namely the north, transition, forest and coastal zones. Since the demarcation in the 1960s, previous studies have rarely provided a more dis-aggregated agro-climatic zone map in tandem with contemporary climate change and variability. The continued u...

The increasing complexity of West African mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) has signified the need for consistent studies of their evolution. Currently, most studies have focused on wet‐season MCS dynamics, but studies of dry‐season storms are equally important to enhance their predictability. Here, two severe thunderstorm case studies in the dry...

Cosmic ray neutron sensors (CRNS) are increasingly used to determine field-scale soil moisture (SM). Uncertainty of the CRNS-derived soil moisture strongly depends on the CRNS count rate subject to Poisson distribution. State-of-the-art CRNS signal processing averages neutron counts over many hours, thereby accounting for soil moisture temporal dyn...

Climate extremes pose threats to lives and properties. It is therefore critical to assess the dynamics of climate extremes in the future. Knowledge of the appropriate models to be used for projection helps reduces uncertainties in model projections. The study assesses the evolution of 8 extreme temperature indices over the Volta Basin for the 1985–...

Accurate and reliable total cloud cover (TCC) observation is essential for astronomy, renewable energy resource assessment, climate impact studies, and agriculture. In order to improve the spatial coverage for a climatological distribution pattern of TCC observation across different climatic zones in Ghana–West Africa, this paper developed a merged...

Climate extreme events affect people whose livelihoods are reliant on the water resources of the Volta Basin in West Africa. Therefore, decision-makers and policymakers need reliable predictions of these extremes on several time scales to develop an Early Warning System (EWS) to combat the devastating impact of extreme climatic events. In that vein...

Photosynthetically active radiation (PAR; 0.40–0.70 μm) is a key driver in ecosystem biochemical processes, and thus a critical factor in agriculture productivity, ecosystem-atmosphere energy, and CO2 fluxes. There is however a dearth of PAR measurements in many regions. Therefore, this paper proposed to estimate and analyze the spatiotemporal dist...

The interplay of soil moisture (SM) and rainfall (RR) has practical importance for pluvial flood prevention and prediction, drought monitoring, and weather forecasting for agricultural applications. Recent satellite products have shown complicated SM - RR relationships over varied ecosystems, with a diverse range of positive to negative correlation...

Rain‐fed agriculture is predominantly the primary source of livelihood in sub‐Saharan Africa. In Ghana, it employs over 60% of the population and contributes to about 30% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Despite the relevance of rain‐fed agriculture to the socioe‐conomic development of the country, studies investigating the impacts of climate v...

Although air pollution in Ghana is ranked number one in environmental health threats to public health and sixth to cause of deaths, routine monitoring is rare. This paper presents fourteen years (2005-2018) assessment of aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 3 km resolution from MODIS Aqua and Terra satellites to ascertain the Spatio-temporal and seasonal...

The Pra river catchment in Ghana is adversely affected by perennial flooding from high-intensity rainfall events. To aid in flood management at the catchment, the Gumbel extreme value distribution has been used to estimate the return periods of maxima rainfall, flood, and consecutive dry and wet days (CDD and CWD) for a period of 5 to 100 years. Th...

Study region The Pra river catchment in Ghana, West Africa. Study focus Knowledge of the spatio-temporal distribution of wet and dry spells are crucial for rain-fed agriculture at the Pra River catchment. This study characterised spells and their associated atmospheric dynamics at the Pra river catchment. Specifically, the variability of historica...

In this study, the long term trend of the observed visibility data used directly (without conversion into dust concentrations) over Sahel was investigated between 1957 and 2013. Then, to review the influence of atmospheric factors and land surface conditions on this trend, the coevolution between the visibility and the dust surface mass concentrati...

Solar radiation is an important geological and meteorological parameter. In most developing countries, data is readily unavailable owing to lack of instrumentation and skilled personnel. In this study, Global solar radiation (GSR) over Ghana has been quantified using the Ångström–Prescott sunshine model with sunshine duration data from 22 synoptic...

Solar radiation is an important geological and meteorological parameter. In most developing countries, data is readily unavailable owing to lack of instrumentation and skilled personnel. In this study, Global solar radiation (GSR) over Ghana has been quantified using the Ångström–Prescott sunshine model with sunshine duration data from 22 synoptic...

Core Ideas A new hydrometeorological observatory was established for the Sudan Savanna. More than 30 hydrometeorological variables in subhourly resolution are provided. Water, energy, and CO 2 fluxes are monitored along a land use change gradient. The data form the basis for an improved impact assessment of environmental changes. It is an excellent...

A selected number of global climate models (GCMs) from the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) were evaluated over the Volta Basin for precipitation. Biases in models were computed by taking the differences between the averages over the period (1950–2004) of the models and the observation, normalized by the average of the observed f...

In the future the Sudanian savanna – one of West Africa's high-potential “bread baskets” – will likely face shorter rainy seasons with more extreme rains and droughts. That could have serious impacts on the vegetation and its carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange with potentially increasing CO2 emissions accelerating climate warming. Understanding how the...

Seasonal predictions of precipitation, among others, are important to help mitigate the effects of drought and floods on agriculture, hydropower generation, disasters, and many more. This work seeks to obtain a suitable combination of physics schemes of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model for seasonal precipitation simulation over Ghan...

Various sectors of the country's economy – agriculture, health, energy, among others – largely depend on climate information, hence availability of quality climate data is very essential for climate-impact studies in these sectors. In this paper, a monthly rainfall database (GMet v1.0) has been developed at a 0.5° × 0.5° spatial resolution, from 11...

To understand surface energy exchange processes over the semiarid regions in West Africa, numerical simulations of surface energy and water balances were carried out using a one-dimensional multilayer atmosphere-SOil-VEGetation (SOLVEG) model for selected days of the dry and rainy seasons over a savanna grassland ecosystem in Sumbrungu in the Upper...

An investigation of the impacts of land surface changes in West Africa, one of the most vulnerable regions of the world with respect to climate changes, require a sound understanding of the land-atmosphere exchange processes and their feedback mechanisms. An investigation of the impacts of land surface changes in West Africa require a sound underst...

Satellite rainfall estimates have predominantly been used for climate impact studies due to poor rain gauge network in sub-Saharan Africa. However, there are limited microscale studies within the sub-region that have assessed the performance of these satellite products, which is the focus of the present study. This paper therefore considers validat...

The main objective of this work is to investigate at regional scale the variability in burned areas over the savannahs of West Africa and their links with the rainfall and the large-scale climatic indexes such as the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and sea surface temperature gradien...

The terrestrial land surface in West Africa is made up of several types of savanna ecosystems differing in land use changes which modulate gas exchanges between their vegetation and the overlying atmosphere. This study compares diurnal and seasonal estimates of CO2 fluxes from three contrasting ecosystems, a grassland, a mixture of fallow and cropl...

The performances of both sunshine and air temperature dependent models for the estimation of global solar radiation (GSR) over Ghana and other tropical regions were evaluated and a comparison assessment of the models was carried out using measured GSR at Owabi (6°45′0′′N, 1°43′0′′W) in the Ashanti region of Ghana. Furthermore, an empirical model wh...

Over the last few decades the land surface has been heavily changed in West Africa due to various anthropogenic measures. The impacts of these land surface changes in conjunction with climate change on hydro-meteorological fluxes are uncertain hindering the development of valuable adaptation measures for a sustainable management of natural resource...

West Africa is characterized by strong land surface changes due to various anthropogenic activities which influence the spatiotemporal patterns of hydro-meteorological fluxes and which might alter the availability of water resources. To investigate these questions, we use a novel two-way coupled atmospheric-hydrological model that allows for a cons...

Performance assessments of jatropha, palm oil and soya bean based biodiesel were carried out to investigate their potential use as conventional substitute for kerosene for domestic purposes in rural- Ghana. The assessments were done by comparing some of the combustion characteristics of blends of the biodiesel with kerosene. The blends were categor...

Species like nitrate (NO3−), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), and formaldehyde (HCHO) are ubiquitous trace compounds in snow. Photochemical reactions of these compounds in the snow can have important implications for the composition of the atmospheric boundary layer in snow-covered regions and for the interpretation of concentration profiles in snow and i...

Massive post-depositional processes alter the nitrate concentration in polar firn where the annual snow accumulation is low. This hinders a direct atmospheric interpretation of the ice core nitrate record. Fractionation of nitrate isotopes during post-depositional nitrate loss may allow estimating the amount of nitrate loss in the past. We measured...