Quasi-decadal signals of Sahel rainfall and West African monsoon since the mid-twentieth century

Coupled Model Simulations of the West African Monsoon System: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Simulations

The ability of coupled GCMs to correctly simulate the climatology and a prominent mode of variability of the West African monsoon is evaluated, and the results are used to make informed decisions about which models may be producing more reliable projections of future climate in this region. The integrations were made available by the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison for t...

Woody Vegetation Die off and Regeneration in Response to Rainfall Variability in the West African Sahel

Figure S1. Flowchart illustrating the method for MODIS based woody cover estimations. Adapted and modified from Brandt et al., [1]. For a full description of the methodological workflow see [1].

On the decadal scale correlation between African dust and Sahel rainfall: The role of Saharan heat low–forced winds

A large body of work has shown that year-to-year variations in North African dust emission are inversely proportional to previous-year monsoon rainfall in the Sahel, implying that African dust emission is highly sensitive to vegetation changes in this narrow transitional zone. However, such a theory is not supported by field observations or modeling studies, as both suggest that interannual var...

The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America

Detection and Attribution of Twentieth-Century Northern and Southern African Rainfall Change

The spatial patterns, time history, and seasonality of African rainfall trends since 1950 are found to be deducible from the atmosphere’s response to the known variations of global sea surface temperatures (SSTs). The robustness of the oceanic impact is confirmed through the diagnosis of 80 separate 50-yr climate simulations across a suite of atmospheric general circulation models. Drying over ...