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Climate science

The mysteries of Sahel droughts

Nature Geoscience volume 1, pages 647–648 (2008)Cite this article

Past variability in Sahel rainfall is closely linked to global sea surface temperature distributions in observations and models alike. Climate simulations for the 21st century suggest that additional influences may become important in the future.

Mortality risk from drought is extremely high across subtropical Africa in both hemispheres1. In the Sahel — the transition zone between the tropical climate of the Guinean coast region and the extreme aridity of the Sahara Desert — persistent drought from the early 1960s into the 1980s caused millions of deaths and hampered development. Early concern focused on the influence of land-use practices2, but later observational3 and modelling4,5,6 studies related decadal-scale Sahel drought with sea surface temperatures. Particularly strong links were found with north–south temperature gradients in the tropical Atlantic and sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific and Indian oceans. Higher rainfall rates returned to the Sahel in the 1990s despite a continued warming of the Indian Ocean7, but the population of the region remains vulnerable. Analysing state-of-the-art climate model simulations, Michela Biasutti and co-authors8 found that the simple statistical model linking sea surface temperatures to Sahel rainfall in simulations of the past does not hold for simulated future climate.

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Figure 1: Future projections of Sahel rainfall.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kerry H. Cook is at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station C1100, Austin, Texas 78712, USA. kc@jsg.utexas.edu,

    Kerry H. Cook

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  1. Kerry H. Cook
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Cook, K. The mysteries of Sahel droughts. Nature Geosci 1, 647–648 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo320

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