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40 Years of Climate Modeling: The Causes of Late-20th Century Drought in the Sahel

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The End of Desertification?

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Abstract

This chapter reviews the evolution of our understanding of the causes of the late 20th century Sahel drought in the context of global climate model development. In describing, in coherent and holistic fashion, physical arguments for local and global influences on regional rainfall variability and change, it aims to make sense of current trends and future projections in the context of the recent past.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For definitions of drought—meteorological, hydrological, agricultural—the reader is referred e.g. to Glantz (1994) and Wilhite (2001). Here drought is synonymous with deficient, or below-average rainfall, where the average is computed on a sufficiently long period, with 30 years being the standard implemented by the UN World Meteorological Organization.

  2. 2.

    Moist air is lighter than dry air, because a molecule of water vapor is lighter than a molecule of nitrogen or oxygen, the most prevalent constituents of the Earth’s atmosphere.

  3. 3.

    The troposphere is the layer of atmosphere closest to the surface, where all human activity takes place. It is ~15 km deep in the tropics and ~10 km deep at high latitudes, and contains 90 % of the atmosphere’s mass.

  4. 4.

    The albedo is the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface to solar radiation. It is a unitless number between 0 and 1. Surfaces that reflect a high proportion of the incoming insolation have high albedo.

  5. 5.

    In this general class of models, also known as GCMs, for “general circulation models” or “global climate models”, the surface of the Earth is divided into squares, or grid boxes, of dimensions currently of the order of ~100 km. In each grid box the evolution of the atmosphere only, initially, and of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, more recently, is derived from the equations of motion—the motion of fluids, the atmosphere and ocean, on a rotating sphere heated by an external source of energy. In the atmosphere only case, the surface temperature of the oceans is prescribed, either to monthly climatological values, or to monthly varying values derived from observations [or from seasonal predictions], while the exchange between land surface and atmosphere is described by empirical relations referred to as parameterizations. In the simplest coupled ocean-atmosphere case, the sole external source of energy is the sun, insolation at the top of the atmosphere is kept constant in time, and the system is let to adjust to the spatial variation in heating that derives from the planet’s own geometry and rotation around its axis, and that of its revolution around the sun. The circulations that ensue in the atmosphere and oceans are manifestations of the inherent “internal” variability in the system as it redistributes heat from warmer to cooler regions.

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Acknowledgements

The author was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through Office of Global Programs grant NA07GP0213, and by the National Science Foundation through Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences grant 0955372. The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable comments received from the reviewer (Stephen D. Prince) and the editor (Roy Behnke), which have helped clarify, focus and streamline the original manuscript.

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  1. International Research Institute for Climate and Society, The Earth Institute, Columbia University, 61 Route 9W, Palisades, NY, 10964-8000, USA

    Alessandra Giannini

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  1. Great Wolford, Odessa Centre, Shipstpon-on-Stour, United Kingdom

    Roy Behnke

  2. Drylands Research, Milborne Port, United Kingdom

    Michael Mortimore

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Giannini, A. (2016). 40 Years of Climate Modeling: The Causes of Late-20th Century Drought in the Sahel. In: Behnke, R., Mortimore, M. (eds) The End of Desertification? . Springer Earth System Sciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16014-1_10

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