A mid-troposphere perspective on the East African climate paradox
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15547001 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas Mölg (0000-0001-8029-8887, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, corresponding author), Carolyne Pickler (0000-0001-6847-3881, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 8 |
| Pages | 084041-084041 |
| Publication date | 2022-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Research Letters (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1748-9326 • E-ISSN: 1748-9326 |
| Publisher | IOP Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1088/1748-9326/ac8565 |
| OpenAlex | W4291606005 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
The East African climate paradox—a term framing the observed precipitation decline in the March–May (MAM) wet season of East Africa from roughly 1980–2010, yet an increase in future climates simulated by global climate models (GCMs)—mostly relies on data representing sea level. Here we add a mid-troposphere perspective by combining in-situ meteorological measurements at ∼6000 m a.s.l. from Africa’s highest mountain summit and a carefully selected subset of GCMs through a machine-learning link. Temporal trends of the resultant six weather types do support a drier mountain climate in the recent past and a moister one in the course of the 21st century, and a key to understanding these contrasting trends materializes from the new dominance of changes in weather type frequency in the future climate. Importantly, however, the results also suggest that the trend reversal requires a strong external climate forcing. Hence, the forcing strength should be considered more systematically in forthcoming studies, to challenge the question whether equatorial East Africa’s MAM climate will indeed become wetter in all plausible future scenarios
Climate change · Climate model · Climatology · Dominance (genetics · Forcing (mathematics · Framing (construction · Geography · Meteorology · Perspective (graphical · Physical geography · Precipitation · Radiative forcing · Summit · Troposphere · Climate variability and models · Environmental Science · Hydrology and Drought Analysis · Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations · Geology · Oceanography
The representative concentration pathways
The NCEP/NCAR 40-Year Reanalysis Project
The Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (Merra-2)
Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature, Version 5 (ERSSTv5)
The ERA5 global reanalysis
Drivers of future changes in East African precipitation
Relative Performance of Self-Organizing Maps and Principal Component Analysis in Pattern Extraction from Synthetic Climatological Data
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |