All sources

Data sources

• Open

  Open-Meteo Historical Weather API

  Hourly temperature at 2m, ERA5 model (Copernicus / ECMWF). Coordinates: 18.0858°N, 15.9785°W. Period: 2019–2025. License CC BY 4.0.
  open-meteo.com

• Open

  WHO / WMO — Tropical night definition

  Standard threshold: nighttime minimum > 25°C. Used as reference. Our analysis uses 26°C with declared justification.

• Official

  SOMELEC — Press communiqués

  Outage reports: March 2026 (OMVS fault during Ramadan), August 2025 (maintenance Dar Naim / Teyaret), May 2020 (OMVS frequency disruption), April 2017 (Manantali over-frequency). No quantitative public outage data available.

• Official

  AfDB — Desert-to-Power Roadmap Mauritania (2020)

  SOMELEC installed capacity (~512–530 MW), energy mix (71% thermal), demand growth (6–7% per year), OMVS interconnection structure.
  afdb.org

• Official

  Climatescope 2022 — Mauritania

  Peak demand (~200 MW), available capacity (~450 MW), electricity access rate (~55%), SOMELEC tariffs ($156/MWh average).
  global-climatescope.org

• Declared

  Local knowledge — Power outages

  Power outages in Nouakchott are frequent and concentrate during the hottest months. Declared as context, not a measured variable. Corroborated by SOMELEC communiqués and press coverage.

• Declared

  Local knowledge — Seasonal exodus and legzer

  The seasonal exodus from Nouakchott — to villages in the interior, abroad, and to legzer on the outskirts — is a phenomenon known to every resident. Declared as context. No seasonal mobility data exists for Nouakchott.

Press coverage

The following articles document specific power outage incidents in Nouakchott, corroborating the declared context.

• Press

  Sahara Medias — March 2026

  City-wide blackout in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, OMVS 225 kV line fault during Ramadan.

• Press

  Sahara Medias — August 2025

  Scheduled outages in Dar Naim / Teyaret for medium-voltage network maintenance.

• Press

  Cridem — Heat-period outages

  Repeated outages lasting over 48 hours in Nouakchott and interior cities during heat waves.

• Press

  Le Calame — May 2020

  OMVS network frequency disruptions causing Nouakchott outages.

Companion project

Reproducibility

All code — the data pipeline, visualization scripts, and the site itself — is available on GitHub. Anyone can reproduce the analysis from scratch with an internet connection and Python 3.