Thunderstorm Trends over Africa

Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria

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 observatio...

Studies of 21st-century precipitation trends over West Africa

West Africa includes a semi-arid zone between the Sahara Desert and the humid Gulf of Guinea coast, approximately between 10°N and 20°N, which is irrigated by summer monsoon rains. This article refers to the region as the Sahel. Rain-fed agriculture is the primary sustenance for Sahel populations, and severe droughts (in the 1970s and 1980s), therefore, have devastating negative societal impact...

Trends in the start of the wet season over Africa

A quarter of a century of daily rainfall data from the Global Telecommunications System are used to define the temporal and spatial variability of the start of the wet season over Africa and surrounding extreme south of Europe and parts of the Middle East. From 1978 to 2002, the start of the wet season arrived later in the year for the majority of the region, as time progressed. In some parts o...

Variation of ionospheric slab thickness over South Africa

Ionospheric slab thickness is defined as the ratio of TEC to maximum electron density of the F-region (NmF2), proportional to the square of the F2-layer critical frequency (foF2). It is an important parameter in that it is linearly correlated with scale height of the ionosphere, which is related to electron density profile. It also reflects variation of the neutral temperature. Therefore, ionos...

A severe thunderstorm climatology for Australia and associated thunderstorm environments