Effect of Climate Change on Pan Evaporation and Potential Evapotranspiration Trends in Umudike, Abia State Nigeria

A study to investigate the effect of climate change on pan evaporation and potential evapotranspiration trends in Umudike was conducted to see if there is a trend, and quality of the data is sufficient for such analysis. The variables used were pan evaporation, air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, number of sunshine hours and solar radiation. The data collected cover a period of twelve years. The monthly mean of these meteorological data were computed for each months of the years and comparative analysis was carried out to see the trends. Then Blaney-morin-Nigeria (Duru, 1984) was used to compute the potential evapotranspiration. Correlation between potential evapotranspiration and some climate variables were made to investigate the effects of these variables on potential evapotranspiration. The results showed that air temperature and solar radiation had strong and positive correlation with potential evapotranspiration ( 0.034) and ( 0.148), relative humidity was negatively correlated ( 0.015). Based on the decline in relative humidity and increasing trend in vapor pressure deficit for the short period of analysis, it appears that Umudike is experiencing increase in evaporation and potential evapotranspiration.