Trends in Sea Level around the Cap Vert Peninsula, Senegal

Thoreux, T.; Sakho, I.; Sall, M.; Testut, L., and Woppelmann, G., 2018. Trends in sea level around the Cap Vert peninsula, Senegal. In: Almar, R.; Almeida, L.P.; Trung Viet, N., and Sall, M. (eds.), Tropical Coastal and Estuarine Dynamics. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 81, pp. 10–13. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.

The variations of the coastline have a great impact on the human activities. Natural mechanisms such as the nearshore sediment transport, non-climatic background geological processes (e.g., land subsidence) or the sea level variations are three important factors that control coastline position. During more than one century, the third process has been extensively studied, at a global scale, using datasets obtained from tide gauges. Sea level observations on the West African coastline are scarse. As an example, the tide gauges in Dakar (Senegal) and in Takoradi (Ghana), are the only ones in West Africa with temporal series longer than 40 years. Such limited amount of data difficults the devevelopment of sea level studies on the vast and variable coastal zone of West Africa. One of the reasons for the limited number of tide gauges is the fact that the majority of the nearshore zone is composed by sandy environments, where these instruments are difficult to install and maintain, In this context spatial altimetry rises as the most adequate solution to overcome this problem. In this study we perform a demonstration of the use of satellite altimetry products to estimate local sea level trends. The study site selected for this work is the Cap Vert peninsula, Sen egal, and the tide gauge from Dakar was used to validate the sea level trends computed using altimetric sea level observations.