Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria

Wim Thiery (), Edouard L. Davin, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Kristopher Bedka, Stef Lhermitte and Nicole P. M. van Lipzig
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Wim Thiery: KU Leuven
Edouard L. Davin: ETH Zurich, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science
Sonia I. Seneviratne: ETH Zurich, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science
Kristopher Bedka: NASA Langley Research Center, Science Directorate, 21 Langley Boulevard
Stef Lhermitte: KU Leuven
Nicole P. M. van Lipzig: KU Leuven

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Weather extremes have harmful impacts on communities around Lake Victoria, where thousands of fishermen die every year because of intense night-time thunderstorms. Yet how these thunderstorms will evolve in a future warmer climate is still unknown. Here we show that Lake Victoria is projected to be a hotspot of future extreme precipitation intensification by using new satellite-based observations, a high-resolution climate projection for the African Great Lakes and coarser-scale ensemble projections. Land precipitation on the previous day exerts a control on night-time occurrence of extremes on the lake by enhancing atmospheric convergence (74%) and moisture availability (26%). The future increase in extremes over Lake Victoria is about twice as large relative to surrounding land under a high-emission scenario, as only over-lake moisture advection is high enough to sustain Clausius–Clapeyron scaling. Our results highlight a major hazard associated with climate change over East Africa and underline the need for high-resolution projections to assess local climate change.

Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms12786

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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12786

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