*2.4. The Crop Yield Anomalies and Correlation with Climate Variables*

The Pearson correlation coefficient which has proven to be an appropriate method for gaining insights into this type of study [52] was used to determine the relationship between maize yield and climatic variables. The data were detrended before performing linear regressions which prevents periodicity in the data. Tmin and Tmax anomalies and rainfall anomalies were correlated with detrended yield values to investigate the impacts of agroclimatic variables on maize production for the period of the study. Detrended yield values were used, for only the growing months (October–April), the coefficient of variance (CV) and standard deviation (SD) were calculated. The CV shows the variability of data around the mean of the population CV= μ/σ where: σ = standard deviation, μ = mean, the variability of the data is determined using CVs presented as a percentage. The standard diversion measures the dispersion of the dataset as relative to its mean. It is the square root of variance.
