Climate Change Brings More Sahel Storms
- csrice8
- May 8, 2017
- 1 min read
Climate change has already made a difference to life in the West African Sahel, the arid belt of land stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea which separates the Sahara desert from the African savanna. It has made catastrophic storms three times more frequent.
And, according to a new study in the journal Nature, Sahel storms are among the most powerful on the planet. In 2009, one vast downpour deposited 263mm of rain over Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, claiming eight lives, flooding half the city and forcing 150,000 people out of their homes.
Researchers believe the pattern of thunderstorms known as mesoscale convective systems will increase in frequency as global temperatures rise, as a consequence of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in turn driven by worldwide use of fossil fuels as sources of energy.
Mesoscale convective systems are big, bad and very cold columns of thunderous cloud: up to 16km high, covering an area of 25,000 square kilometres, and with temperatures at the highest altitude as low as minus 40°C.
