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The regional climate as it is now and in the future will put pressure on investments in sub-Saharan Africa in water resource management, fisheries, and other crop and livestock production systems. Changes in oceanic characteristics across the Atlantic Ocean will result in remarkable vulnerability of coastal ecology, littorals, and mangroves in the middle of the twenty-first century and beyond. In line with the countries' objectives of creating a green economy that allows reduced greenhouse gas emissions, improved resource efficiency, and prevention of biodiversity loss, we identify the most pressing needs for adaptation and the best adaptation choices that are also clean and affordable. According to empirical data from the field and customized model simulation designs, the cost of these adaptation measures will likely decrease and benefit sustainable green growth in agriculture, water resource management, and coastal ecosystems, as hydroclimatic hazards such as pluviometric and thermal extremes become more common in West Africa. Most of these adaptation options are local and need to be scaled up and operationalized for sustainable development. Governmental sovereign wealth funds, investments from the private sector, and funding from global climate funds can be used to operationalize these adaptation measures. Effective legislation, knowledge transfer, and pertinent collaborations are necessary for their success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little scientific consensus on the importance of external climate forcings—including anthropogenic aerosols, volcanic aerosols, and greenhouse gases (GHG)—relative to each other and to internal variability in dictating past and future Sahel rainfall. We address this query by relating a 3-tiered multi-model mean (MMM) over the Climate Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 "twentieth century" and pre-Industrial control simulations to observations. The comparison of single-forcing and historical simulations highlights the importance of anthropogenic and volcanic aerosols over GHG in generating forced Sahel rainfall variability in models. However, the forced MMM only accounts for a small fraction of observed variance. A residual consistency test shows that simulated internal variability cannot explain the residual observed multidecadal variability, and points to model deficiency in simulating multidecadal variability in the forced response, internal variability, or both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit the multi-model ensemble produced by phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) to synthesize current understanding of external forcing of Sahel rainfall change, past and future, through the lens of oceanic influence. The CMIP5 multi-model mean simulates the twentieth century evolution of Sahel rainfall, including the mid-century decline toward the driest years in the early 1980s and the partial recovery since. We exploit a physical argument linking anthropogenic emissions to the change in the temperature of the sub-tropical North Atlantic Ocean relative to the global tropical oceans to demonstrate indirect attribution of late twentieth century Sahel drought to the unique combination of aerosols and greenhouse gases that characterized the post-World War II period. The subsequent reduction in aerosol emissions around the North Atlantic that resulted from environmental legislation to curb acid rain, occurring as global tropical warming continued unabated, is consistent with the current partial recovery and with projections of future wetting. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) applied to the above-mentioned sea surface temperature (SST) indices provides a succinct description of oceanic influence on Sahel rainfall and reveals the near-orthogonality in the influence of emissions between twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the independent effects of aerosols and greenhouse gases project on the difference of SST indices and explain past variation, while the dominance of greenhouse gases projects on their sum and explains future projection. This result challenges the assumption that because anthropogenic warming had a hand in past Sahel drought, continued warming will result in further drying. In fact, the twenty-first century dominance of greenhouse gases, unchallenged by aerosols, results in projections consistent with warming-induced strengthening of the monsoon, a response that has gained in coherence in CMIP5 compared to prior multi-model exercises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional information on climate change is urgently needed but often deemed unreliable. To achieve credible regional climate projections, it is essential to understand underlying physical processes, reduce model biases and evaluate their impact on projections, and adequately account for internal variability. In the tropics, where atmospheric internal variability is small compared with the forced change, advancing our understanding of the coupling between long-term changes in upper-ocean temperature and the atmospheric circulation will help most to narrow the uncertainty. In the extratropics, relatively large internal variability introduces substantial uncertainty, while exacerbating risks associated with extreme events. Large ensemble simulations are essential to estimate the probabilistic distribution of climate change on regional scales. Regional models inherit atmospheric circulation uncertainty from global models and do not automatically solve the problem of regional climate change. We conclude that the current priority is to understand and reduce uncertainties on scales greater than 100 km to aid assessments at finer scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the Sahel region of Africa is impacted by decadal scale variability in precipitation, driven by global sea surface temperatures. This work demonstrates that the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Community Atmosphere Model, version 4 is capable of reproducing relationships between Sahelian precipitation variability and Indian and Atlantic Ocean sea surface temperature variations on such timescales. Further analysis then constructs a moisture budget breakdown using model output and shows that the change in precipitation minus evaporation in the region is dominated by column integrated moisture convergence due to the mean flow, with the convergence of mass in the atmospheric column mainly responsible. It is concluded that the oceanic forcing of atmospheric mass convergence and divergence to a first order explains the moisture balance patterns in the region. In particular, the anomalous circulation patterns, including net moisture divergence by the mean and transient flows combined with negative moisture advection, together explain the drying of the Sahel during the second half of the twentieth century. Diagnosis of moisture budget and circulation components within the main rainbelt and along the monsoon margins show that changes to the mass convergence are related to the magnitude of precipitation that falls in the region, while the advection of dry air is associated with the maximum latitudinal extent of precipitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Sahel region, seasonal predictions are crucial to alleviate the impacts of climate variability on populations' livelihoods. Agricultural planning (e.g., decisions about sowing date, fertilizer application date, and choice of crop or cultivar) is based on empirical predictive indices whose accuracy to date has not been scientifically proven. This paper attempts to statistically test whether the pattern of rainfall distribution over the May-July period contributes to predicting the real onset date and the nature (wet or dry) of the rainy season, as farmers believe. To that end, we considered historical records of daily rainfall from 51 stations spanning the period 1920-2008 and the different agro-climatic zones in Burkina Faso. We performed (1) principal component analysis to identify climatic zones, based on the patterns of intra-seasonal rainfall, (2) and linear discriminant analysis to find the best rainfall-based variables to distinguish between real and false onset dates of the rainy season, and between wet and dry seasons in each climatic zone. A total of nine climatic zones were identified in each of which, based on rainfall records from May to July, we derived linear discriminant functions to correctly predict the nature of a potential onset date of the rainy season (real or false) and that of the rainy season (dry or wet) in at least three cases out of five. These functions should contribute to alleviating the negative impacts of climate variability in the different climatic zones of Burkina Faso. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intra-seasonal drought episodes (extreme dry spells) are strongly linked to crop yield loss in the West African Sahel, especially when they occur at crop critical stages such as juvenile or flowering stage. This paper seeks to expose potentially predictable features in the sub-seasonal to inter-annual occurrence of 'extreme dry spells' (extDS) through their links to sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs). We consider two kinds of extreme dry spells: more than 2 weeks of consecutive dry days following a rain event (often found at the beginning of the rainy season, after the first rain events) and more than a week (observed towards the end of the rainy season, before the last rain events). We extract dry spells from daily rainfall data at 43 stations (31 stations in Senegal over 1950-2010 and 12 stations in Niger over 1960-2000) to identify the intra-seasonal distribution of extDS and their significant correlation with local rainfall deficits. Seasonality of distribution and high spatial coherence are found in the timing and the frequency of occurrence of extDS in different rainfall regions over Niger and Senegal. The correlation between the regional occurrence index (ROI), necessary to capture the spatial extent of extDS, and observed global sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs) sheds light on the influence of the external factors on the decadal, interannual and sub-seasonal variability of extDS over the West African Sahel. When the global tropics and the Atlantic are warmer than normal, more coherent and delayed June-July extDS are observed after onset of rainy season, as well as early cessation type in August-September. When the Indo-Pacific is cooler and the equatorial south Atlantic is warmer than normal little to no extDS are found in the onset sub-period of the monsoon season. Mostly late types of extDS occur in October as a result of late cessation. These results show potential predictability of extreme dry spells after onset and before cessation of monsoonal rain based on global patterns of sea surface temperature anomalies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the global climate system context in which to interpret African environmental change to support planning and implementation of policymaking action at national, regional and continental scales, and to inform the debate between proponents of mitigation v. adaptation strategies in the face of climate change. We review recent advances and current challenges in African climate research and exploit our physical understanding of variability and trends to shape our outlook on future climate change. We classify the various mechanisms that have been proposed as relevant for understanding variations in African rainfall, emphasizing a “tropospheric stabilization” mechanism that is of importance on interannual time scales as well as for the future response to warming oceans. Two patterns stand out in our analysis of twentieth century rainfall variability: a drying of the monsoon regions, related to warming of the tropical oceans, and variability related to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The latest generation of climate models partly captures this recent continent-wide drying trend, attributing it to the combination of anthropogenic emissions of aerosols and greenhouse gases, the relative contribution of which is difficult to quantify with the existing model archive. The same climate models fail to reach a robust agreement regarding the twenty-first century outlook for African rainfall, in a future with increasing greenhouse gases and decreasing aerosol loadings. Such uncertainty underscores current limitations in our understanding of the global climate system that it is necessary to overcome if science is to support Africa in meeting its development goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A nine-member ensemble of simulations with a state-of-the-art atmospheric model forced only by the observed record of sea surface temperature (SST) over 1930–2000 is shown to capture the dominant patterns of variability of boreal summer African rainfall. One pattern represents variability along the Gulf of Guinea, between the equator and 10°N. It connects rainfall over Africa to the Atlantic marine Intertropical Convergence Zone, is controlled by local, i.e., eastern equatorial Atlantic, SSTs, and is interannual in time scale. The other represents variability in the semi-arid Sahel, between 10°N and 20°N. It is a continental pattern, capturing the essence of the African summer monsoon, while at the same time displaying high sensitivity to SSTs in the global tropics. A land–atmosphere feedback associated with this pattern translates precipitation anomalies into coherent surface temperature and evaporation anomalies, as highlighted by a simulation where soil moisture is held fixed to climatology. As a consequence of such feedback, it is shown that the recent positive trend in surface temperature is consistent with the ocean-forced negative trend in precipitation, without the need to invoke the direct effect of the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases. We advance plausible mechanisms by which the balance between land–ocean temperature contrast and moisture availability that defines the monsoon could have been altered in recent decades, resulting in persistent drought. This discussion also serves to illustrate ways in which the monsoon may be perturbed, or may already have been perturbed, by anthropogenic climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the factors that trigger the climatic recovery in Sahel. Description of the weather condition in the region, which was plagued with persistent drought from 1970s to 1980s, and its vulnerability to climate changes, is provided. The study conducted by researchers Buwen Dong and Rowan Sutton, who cited higher atmospheric concentrations of greenhouses gases and atmospheric temperature as the major cause of climate recovery, is offered.