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Reconciling theory with the reality of African heatwaves

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 796–798 (2020)Cite this article

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Extreme weather damage databases report no significant heatwave impacts in sub-Saharan Africa since 1900, yet the region has experienced a number of heatwaves and will be affected disproportionately by them under climate change. Addressing this reporting discrepancy is crucial to assess the impacts of future extreme heat there.

As global temperatures continue to rise unabated1, the frequency and severity of extreme heatwaves around the world have intensified significantly2,3 and will continue to do so until carbon emissions reach net zero4. Regional hotspots have been identified in observations2 and model projections3 using a multitude of heatwave metrics, with particularly severe changes in both anomalous temperatures2,3 and heat stress5 found over lower latitude countries, including sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)6. The reasons for this regional diversity are well understood: tropical temperature regimes are relatively stable across daily, seasonal and interannual timescales, such that any warming signal produces a greater departure from typical experiences7 and, with it, more record-breaking extreme events6.

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Fig. 1: Extreme heat during the 1991/1992 Southern Africa drought.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts for the provision of ERA5 data, which can be freely accessed via the Copernicus Climate Change Service Climate Data Store (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/home), and thank the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) for the provision of EM-DAT data, which can be freely accessed for non-commercial use via https://public.emdat.be/. The authors acknowledge support from the FORMAS project 2018-02800, entitled ‘Global Attribution Models, Mediation and Mobilisation (GAMES)’.

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  1. Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Luke J. Harrington & Friederike E. L. Otto

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Correspondence to Luke J. Harrington.

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Harrington, L.J., Otto, F.E.L. Reconciling theory with the reality of African heatwaves. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 796–798 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0851-8

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