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Anthropogenic Mediterranean warming essential driver for present and future Sahel rainfall

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 941–945 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

The long-lasting Sahel drought in the 1970s and 1980s caused enormous human and socio-economic losses1, driving extensive research on its causes2,3,4,5,6,7,8. Although changes in global and regional sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are thought to be dominant drivers of the severe Sahel drying trend9,10,11,12, the mechanisms for the recent recovery trend are not fully clear yet, but are often assumed to be akin to the previous SST–Sahel drought linkage13,14,15. Here we show, by analysing observational and multi-model data and conducting SST-sensitivity experiments with two state-of-the-art atmospheric models, that the SST key area causing the recent Sahel rainfall recovery is the Mediterranean Sea. Anthropogenic warming of this region has driven the shift from the tropical Atlantic and Indo-Pacific oceans, which historically were the main driver of Sahel drought. The wetting impact of Mediterranean Sea warming can become more dominant in a future warming climate and is key to understanding the uncertainty in future Sahel rainfall projections.

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Figure 1: Contributions of different ocean basins to the recent Sahel wetting.
Figure 2: Dominant role of the Mediterranean Sea in the recent recovery of Sahel rainfall.
Figure 3: Increasing impact of the Mediterranean Sea in a warming climate.
Figure 4: Contributions of different ocean basins to a strong future Sahel wetting.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the modelling groups and the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling for their roles in making available the CMIP5 multi-model data set, and the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) for providing the computer hardware for our model experiments. This work was supported by the BMBF projects, RACE (FKZ:03F0729D) and MiKlip (FKZ: 01LP1158A), and was carried out in the frame of the internal MPI-M project ‘Tropical VIBES’.

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Author notes

  1. Jong-yeon Park

    Present address: Present address: Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University, 201 Forrestal Road, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.,

Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg 20146, Germany

    Jong-yeon Park, Jürgen Bader & Daniela Matei

  2. Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA

    Jong-yeon Park

  3. Uni Climate, Uni Research & the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen 5007, Norway

    Jürgen Bader

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  1. Jong-yeon Park
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Contributions

J.-y.P., J.B. and D.M. contributed to developing the research. J.-y.P. performed the analysis and SST-sensitivity experiments. All authors discussed the results and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Jong-yeon Park.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Park, Jy., Bader, J. & Matei, D. Anthropogenic Mediterranean warming essential driver for present and future Sahel rainfall. Nature Clim Change 6, 941–945 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3065

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