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A recent and abrupt decline in the East African long rains
Open accessAbstract
The successive failure of the East African short rains (typically October‐December) and subsequent long rains (March‐May) in 2010–11 plunged much of the region into severe drought, impacting millions of people and triggering a humanitarian crisis. While poor short rains in 2010 were generally anticipated given linkages with La Niña, the subsequent long rains do not exhibit similar predictability. Here we show the long rains failure in boreal spring of 2011 is consistent with a recurrent large‐scale precipitation pattern that followed their abrupt decline around 1999. Using observations and climate model simulations, we show the abrupt decline in long rains precipitation is linked to similarly abrupt changes in sea surface temperatures, predominately in the tropical Pacific basin.
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Cited by
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Tierney, J. E., Smerdon, J. E., Anchukaitis, K. J., & Seager, R. (2013) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature11785 · Cited by 352
Extreme Weather and Civil War: Does Drought Fuel Conflict in Somalia through Livestock Price Shocks?
Maystadt, J.-F., & Ecker, O. (2014) · American Journal of Agricultural Economics · doi:10.1093/ajae/aau010 · Cited by 346
Attribution analysis of the Ethiopian drought of 2015
Philip, S., Kew, S. F., Jan van Oldenborgh, G., Otto, F., O’Keefe, S., Haustein, K., King, A., Zegeye, A., Eshetu, Z., Hailemariam, K., et al. (2018) · Journal of Climate · doi:10.1175/jcli-d-17-0274.1 · Cited by 170
Attributing drivers of the 2016 Kenyan drought
Uhe, P., Philip, S., Kew, S., Shah, K., Kimutai, J., Mwangi, E., van Oldenborgh, G. J., Singh, R., Arrighi, J., Jjemba, E., et al. (2018) · International Journal of Climatology · doi:10.1002/joc.5389 · Cited by 130
Projected Changes in East African Rainy Seasons
Cook, K. H., & Vizy, E. K. (2013) · Journal of Climate · doi:10.1175/jcli-d-12-00455.1 · Cited by 121
Metadata
- Authors
- Lyon, B., & DeWitt, D. G.
- Venue
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Publisher
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Published
- 2012-01
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 0094-8276 (ISSN-L)
- 1944-8007
- OpenAlex
- W1530440617
- Cited by
- 455
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 17.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- Lyon, B., & DeWitt, D. G. (2012). A recent and abrupt decline in the East African long rains. Geophysical Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1029/2011gl050337
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
