0000000000364374
AUTHOR
Arona Diedhiou
Uses and limits of thermal indices: the case of Sahel
International audience; Our main goal here is to analyse extreme heat waves (HWs) in the Sahel (13°N-18°N; 16°W-30°E), using different thermal indices. In the ACASIS project funded bythe French “Agence Nationale de la Recherche”, HWs analyses are characterized forthe first time during the hottest season in the Sahel, using the Global Summary of theDay (GSOD) synoptic observations during April-May-June 1973-2013. Such extremehigh temperatures are usually defined by 3 criteria: 1/ Their low probability ofoccurrence: less than the 10% of the days. The use of absolute thresholds,associated with heat budget and physiological impacts, could be an alternative(Seneviratne et al., 2012). 2/ Their in…
Climate and extreme rainfall events in the Mono river basin (West Africa): investigating future changes with Regional Climate Models.
This study characterizes the future changes in extreme rainfall and air temperature in the Mono river basin where the main economic activity is weather dependent and local populations are highly vulnerable to natural hazards, including flood inundations. Daily precipitation and temperature from observational datasets and Regional Climate Models (RCMs) output from REMO, RegCM, HadRM3, and RCA were used to analyze climatic variations in space and time, and fit a GEV model to investigate the extreme rainfalls and their return periods. The results indicate that the realism of the simulated climate in this domain is mainly controlled by the choice of the RCMs. These RCMs projected a 1 to 1.5 °
Downscaling West African climate : uncertainties, sensitivity to the model physics and regional variability
We present here a set of regional climate simulations, complementary to the CORDEX-Africa modeling exercice, performed over West Africa during the 1989-2010 period using the non-hydrostatic model WRF. Lateral and SST forcings are provided by ERA-Interim reanalyses. The regional domain [45W 45E 10S 30N] encompasses West Africa and the nearby Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Guinea. The grid resolution is moderate (80km, with 28 levels on the vertical) in order to reduce computational costs and multiply sensitivity experiments. A first set of fifteen 20-year long simulations addresses the influence of the model physics (convective, radiative and land surface schemes). A second set of simulations co…
Quasi-decadal signals of Sahel rainfall and West African monsoon since the mid-twentieth century
[1] Sahel rainfall shows pronounced decadal variability and a negative trend between wet conditions in the 1950s–1960s and dry ones in the 1970s–1980s. Using continuous wavelet transform, the quasi-decadal variability (QDV) of rainfall reveals zonal contrasts. The highest QDV is identified in the 1950s–1960s over western Sahel and in the 1970s–1980s over eastern Sahel. The quasi-decadal atmospheric anomalies have been reconstructed using Fourier transform for the 1950s–1960s and the 1970s–1980s, respectively, and assessed by the composite analysis of the QDV phases for the periods before and after 1968. Over western Sahel, the rainfall QDV in the 1950s–1960s is related to the North Atlantic…