Sahel Cube (Space-Time Data Cube) for Climate-Mobility and Interdisciplinary Nexus Research

Understanding how climate variability shapes mobility in the Sahel and around the world requires tools that integrate environmental and social data across coherent spatial and temporal scales. Yet most empirical studies rely on single indicators such as SPEI or NDVI and operate within administrative boundaries that rarely align with ecological processes or mobility pathways. These constraints limit the capacity of social-science research to capture the multi-dimensional nature of climate stress and its influence on population movements. In this research work, the focus has been given to the Sahel region in Africa. This research presents the Sahel Cube, inspired by EUMETSAT’s D&V cube that uses EUMETSAT’s archive data and other environmental datasets. The cube unifies decades of climate, vegetation, and hydrometeorological information into a reproducible spatial–temporal architecture that supports cross-disciplinary analyses. As one of the use cases, we integrate Call Detail Record (CDR) based mobility trends to examine how, when, and where climate stress corresponds with observed mobility patterns. A core innovation of the cube is its capacity to generate geons, data-driven spatial units that reflect environmentally coherent regions rather than political borders. These geons improve the alignment between environmental dynamics and social processes, strengthening the evidence base for climate–mobility studies and broader nexus research.