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Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria.


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.

SUBMITTER: Thiery W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5036145 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria.

Thiery Wim W   Davin Edouard L EL   Seneviratne Sonia I SI   Bedka Kristopher K   Lhermitte Stef S   van Lipzig Nicole P M NP  

Nature communications 20160923


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 project  ...[more]

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