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Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria
Weather extremes have harmful impacts on communities around Lake Victoria, where thousands of fishermen die every year because of intense night-time thunderstorms. Yet how these thunderstorms will evolve in a future warmer climate is still unknown. Here we show that Lake Victoria is projected to be...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5036145/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27658848 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12786 |
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author | Thiery, Wim Davin, Edouard L. Seneviratne, Sonia I. Bedka, Kristopher Lhermitte, Stef van Lipzig, Nicole P. M. |
author_facet | Thiery, Wim Davin, Edouard L. Seneviratne, Sonia I. Bedka, Kristopher Lhermitte, Stef van Lipzig, Nicole P. M. |
author_sort | Thiery, Wim |
collection | PubMed |
description | Weather extremes have harmful impacts on communities around Lake Victoria, where thousands of fishermen die every year because of intense night-time thunderstorms. Yet how these thunderstorms will evolve in a future warmer climate is still unknown. Here we show that Lake Victoria is projected to be a hotspot of future extreme precipitation intensification by using new satellite-based observations, a high-resolution climate projection for the African Great Lakes and coarser-scale ensemble projections. Land precipitation on the previous day exerts a control on night-time occurrence of extremes on the lake by enhancing atmospheric convergence (74%) and moisture availability (26%). The future increase in extremes over Lake Victoria is about twice as large relative to surrounding land under a high-emission scenario, as only over-lake moisture advection is high enough to sustain Clausius–Clapeyron scaling. Our results highlight a major hazard associated with climate change over East Africa and underline the need for high-resolution projections to assess local climate change. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5036145 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-50361452016-10-04 Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria Thiery, Wim Davin, Edouard L. Seneviratne, Sonia I. Bedka, Kristopher Lhermitte, Stef van Lipzig, Nicole P. M. Nat Commun Article Weather extremes have harmful impacts on communities around Lake Victoria, where thousands of fishermen die every year because of intense night-time thunderstorms. Yet how these thunderstorms will evolve in a future warmer climate is still unknown. Here we show that Lake Victoria is projected to be a hotspot of future extreme precipitation intensification by using new satellite-based observations, a high-resolution climate projection for the African Great Lakes and coarser-scale ensemble projections. Land precipitation on the previous day exerts a control on night-time occurrence of extremes on the lake by enhancing atmospheric convergence (74%) and moisture availability (26%). The future increase in extremes over Lake Victoria is about twice as large relative to surrounding land under a high-emission scenario, as only over-lake moisture advection is high enough to sustain Clausius–Clapeyron scaling. Our results highlight a major hazard associated with climate change over East Africa and underline the need for high-resolution projections to assess local climate change. Nature Publishing Group 2016-09-23 /pmc/articles/PMC5036145/ /pubmed/27658848 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12786 Text en Copyright © 2016, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Thiery, Wim Davin, Edouard L. Seneviratne, Sonia I. Bedka, Kristopher Lhermitte, Stef van Lipzig, Nicole P. M. Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria |
title | Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria |
title_full | Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria |
title_fullStr | Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria |
title_full_unstemmed | Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria |
title_short | Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria |
title_sort | hazardous thunderstorm intensification over lake victoria |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5036145/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27658848 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12786 |
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