Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria

Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria

Thiery, Wim (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; ETH Zürich)
Davin, Edouard L. (ETH Zürich)
Seneviratne, SI
Bedka, Kristopher (NASA Langley Research Center)
Lhermitte, S.L.M. (TU Delft Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
van Lipzig, Nicole P. M. (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

2016

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.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6bfc2da0-026c-4b32-a89f-f94775323850

https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12786

2041-1723

Nature Communications, 7, 1-7

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2016 Wim Thiery, Edouard L. Davin, SI Seneviratne, Kristopher Bedka, S.L.M. Lhermitte, Nicole P. M. van Lipzig