Assessment of Soil Moisture and Drought Prevalence Over Kano State

Kano State is the most populous state in the northern part of Nigeria with huge economic and political significance. It is bounded by arid areas in the North and forested areas in the South, this land cover shift from south to north has significance on drought and soil moisture. This paper assessed soil moisture contents of Kano State using satellite sources of soil moisture, the study showed that while the North and South of Kano State have distinctively different land cover, the condition of soil moisture has continued to decline further especially in the Northern part of the state. Analysis was carried out using MATLAB to extract the gridded data and convert it into a geo-formatted file, this geo-formatted file was imported into ArcGIS workspace and geoprocessing techniques were used to analyse the spatial distribution of soil moisture over Kano State. The results of the spatiotemporal analysis of the soil moisture over Kano State indicated a decrease by about 13% from 2004 to 2024 in the northern part and 3% in the southern. Thus, increasing drought and making life harder for people and animals leaving in these areas. This discovery necessitates government intervention in the provision of water reservoirs and/or piping water from other areas to areas with extremely low soil moisture.