20.500.12592/x0m278
Climate Impacts in the Sahel and West Africa
25 August 2016
Summary
Carlo has been the principal scientist in various climate-related projects in Africa, including an assessment of the impacts of climate change on the Nile basin and a study on the possible links between climate change and geopolitical instability in the Sahel. [...] The acknowledgement of the critical importance of climate to human and planetary well-being, pushes the demands on climate science to an extreme and the task for climate scientists to meet demands for the provision of high-quality, traceable information to support this discourse, is huge. [...] At a first order, both temperature and precipitation and their annual cycle depend on the way in which the air masses associated with the dry and hot desert interior and the humid ocean to the south and the west, interact. [...] The seasonal migration of these rain bands is the main driver of one of the most typical features of the tropical climate: the alternation of dry and wet seasons. [...] However, over the last century the most remarkable feature associated with the climate of the region is undoubtedly the reduction in precipitation that was recorded in the 1970s and 1980s.
