Recent changes in precipitation, ITCZ convection and northern tropical circulation over North Africa (1979-2007)
This article focuses on some recent changes observed in the Tropics with special emphasis on the African monsoon region using high-resolution gridded precipitation from the Climatic Research Unit (period 1979–2002), outgoing longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and atmospheric reanalyses from the Climate Prediction Center (NCEP-DOE2, period 1979–2007). The results show a rainfall increase in North Africa since the mid-90s with significant northward migrations of rainfall amounts, i.e. + 1.5° for the 400 mm July to September isohyets, whereas deep convection has significantly increased and shifted northward. The subsidence b…
Interacción entre el Monzón de África Occidental y el clima Mediterráneo en verano: Artículo de revisión
Although in the framework of the global climate research the Mediterranean climate variability and the West African Monsoon (WAM) dynamics have been considered for a long time as “passive” systems, i.e., prone to the influence of large scale ocean and atmospheric variability, over the last decade many studies have been dedicated to the WAM-Mediterranean interaction and the active role of these climate systems has been highlighted. This article presents the WAM-Mediterranean teleconnection through an overview of the recent literature, describing the observational evidences and the dynamical mechanisms underlying this climate teleconnection. The influence of the Mediterranean Sea thermal anom…
West African Monsoon influence on the summer Euro-Atlantic circulation
International audience; The West African Monsoon (WAM) influence on the interannual variability of the summer atmospheric circulation over North Atlantic and Europe is investigated over the period 1971-2000. A set of sensitivity experiments performed through the Arpege-Climat atmospheric general circulation model is analyzed, using the so-called "grid-point nudging" technique, where the simulated atmospheric fields in the WAM region are relaxed towards the ERA40 reanalysis. Observations confirm that a sizable part of the Euro-Atlantic circulation variability is related to the WAM, with anomalies of reinforced convection in the Sudan-Sahel region associated with positive North Atlantic Oscil…
Time evolution of observed July–September sea surface temperature-Sahel climate teleconnection with removed quasi-global effect (1900–2008)
[1] Using sea surface temperature (SST), precipitation, and atmospheric information, this statistical study revisits the questions of the July–September SST-Sahel teleconnection variability after removing impact of quasi-global SSTs over the period 1900–2008. The eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean dominate the relationship, both in terms of intensity and time stability, with significant values in 52% and 47% of years, respectively. More than two thirds of the rainy seasons classified as dry (wet) and 16 out of 18 (12 out of 15) of those classified as very dry (very wet) are concomitant of negative (positive) differences between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Correlations wi…
Influence of the Mediterranean Sea on the West African monsoon: Intraseasonal variability in numerical simulations
[1] The influence of May to September sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the Mediterranean Sea on the West African monsoon is investigated, analyzing the outputs of numerical sensitivity experiments performed using three atmospheric general circulation models (Action de Recherche Petite Echelle Grande Echelle, European/Hamburg, and University of California, Los Angeles) in the framework of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis project. The precipitation and atmospheric dynamics response to the SST forcing is explored, in terms of intraseasonal variability, evaluating the results from the individual models and from the multimodel mean. A positive precipitation response to wa…