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Spatiotemporal trends in daily observed precipitation, river discharge, maximum and minimum temperature data were investigated between 1971 and 2013 in the Komadugu-Yobe basin. Significant change points in time series are corrected using Adapted Caussinus-Mestre Algorithm for homogenizing Networks of Temperature series algorithm. Mann–Kendall test and Sen's slope are used to estimate the trend and its magnitude at dry, wet and annual season time scales, respectively. Preliminary results show an increasing trend of the observed variables. There is a latitudinal increase (decrease) in the basin temperature (precipitation) from lower to higher latitudes. The minimum temperature (0.05 °C/year) increases faster than the maximum temperature (0.03 °C/year). Overall, the percentage changes in minimum temperature range between 3 and 10% while that of maximum temperature ranges between 1 and 3%. Due to precipitation dependence on regional characteristics, the highest percentage change was recorded in precipitation with values between −5 and 97%. In all time scales, river discharge and precipitation have strong positive correlations while the correlation between river discharge and temperature is negative. It is imperative to advocate and support positive developmental practices as well as establishing necessary mitigation measures to cope with the effects of climate in the basin.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11 March 2020 due to its global spread. In Nigeria, the first case was documented on 27 February 2020. Since then, it has spread to most parts of the country. This study models, forecasts and projects COVID-19 incidence, cumulative incidence and death cases in Nigeria using six estimation methods i.e. the attack rate, maximum likelihood, exponential growth, Markov chain monte Carlo (MCMC), time-dependent and the sequential Bayesian approaches. A sensitivity analysis with respect to the mean generation time is used to quantify the associated reproduction number uncertainties. The relationship between the COVID-19 incidence and five meteorological variables are further assessed. The result shows that the highest incidences are recorded in days with either religious activities or market days while the weekday trend decreases towards the weekend. It is also established that COVID-19 incidence significantly increases with increasing sea level pressure (0.7 correlation coefficient) and significantly decreases with increasing maximum temperature (-0.3 correlation coefficient). Also, selecting an optimal period for reproduction number estimates reduces the variability between estimates. As an example, in the EG approach, the epidemic curve that optimally fits the exponential growth is between 1- and 53-time units with reproduction number estimate of 1.60 [1.58; 1.62] at 95% confidence interval. However, this optimal reproduction number estimate is different from the default reproduction number estimate. Using the MCMC approach, the correlation coefficients between the observed and forecasted incidence, cumulative death and cumulative confirmed cases are 0.66, 0.92 and 0.90 respectively. The projections till December shows values approaching 1,000,000, 120,000 and 3,000,000 respectively. Therefore, timely intervention and effective preventive measures are immediately needed to mitigate a full-scale epidemic in the country.