Recent changes in the level of Lake Naivasha,Kenya, as an indicator of equatorial westerlies over East Africa

A previously unpublished record of lake levels from Lake Naivasha, Kenya from 1880 to 1976 has been analysed and shows little similarity to the level record from nearby Lake Victoria. Level changes from year to year of the two lakes show no significant correlation (at 5%) and spectral analysis of the two records shows no common significant peaks. Both lakes show significant correlations between their level changes and the strength of the North Atlantic winter circulation, with the correlation coefficients in opposing directions indicating important, but different, large scale climatic links.Lake Naivasha's major level increases occur during May and September. Lake Victoria's level increases mainly in May with a small December increase. East African rainfall is generally during April and November, corresponding with Lake Victoria's changes. Rainfall records from Kenyan highland areas, however, show an August rainfall peak and little rainfall in November. Rainfall amounts from Equator, a highland meteorological station, for July, August and September are highly correlated (at 1% significance level) with the change in Naivasha's level during September. Winds at the highland stations are westerly during August while the lower level stations experience the drier S.E. Trades. The level changes of Lake Naivasha indicate changes in the extent of the penetration of moist air from West Africa between the Trade winds and the 200 mb easterly jet.     

Historical and Modern Fluctuations of Lakes Tanganyika and Rukwa and Their Relationship to Rainfall Variability

This paper describes the fluctuations of Lakes Tanganyika and Rukwa over the last two centuries. Lake chronologies extending back to the late eighteenth century are derived from reports of European visitors, settlers and explorers and from oral accounts of the local peoples. The historical fluctuations are meshed with the modern record to provide a picture of the lakes' fluctuations until the late twentieth century. The historical fluctuations of the lakes are quite similar. The most important of these are low levels during the first half of the nineteenth century, very high stands in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and, around the turn of the century, a rapid fall to twentieth century levels. This pattern is ubiquitous throughout eastern Africa and is apparent in numerous other lakes, including Victoria, Naivasha, Stefanie, Turkana, Malawi and Chilwa. Driest periods were in the 1920s or earlier and in the 1950s. Lake Tanganyika returned to extremely high stands in the 1960s and has continued to maintain relatively high stands since that time. Lake Rukwa rose to high stands during the 1980s and maintained them for several years. An analysis of rainfall variability shows that these trends are generally explained by variations in catchment rainfall. However, the lakes' responses to rainfall variability are sometimes dissimilar because Lake Rukwa is a closed basin. Our results demonstrate the complexity of the rainfall/lake-level relationships and the need to use water balance relationships in order to interpret the lakes' historical or paleo-fluctuations in terms of rainfall.     

A Semi-Quantitative, Regional Precipitation Data Set for Studying African Climates of the Nineteenth Century, Part I. Overview of the Data Set

This article describes a historical archive of proxy and actual precipitation data that extends the African climate record back to the early nineteenth century. The `proxy' archive includes verbal, documentary references which contain information related to rainfall conditions, such as references to famine, drought, agriculture or the nature of the rainy season. The precipitation archive includes all observations made in Africa during the nineteenth century. It consists of records for 60 stations in Algeria, 87 stations in South Africa and 304 stations scattered over the rest of Africa. Information is particularly plentiful for the 1880s and 1890s. The two parts have been be combined into a semi-quantitative regional data set indicating annual rainfall conditions in terms of anomaly classes (e.g., normal, dry, wet). This data set extends from the early nineteenth century to 1900 and distinguishes seven anomaly classes, using numbers ranging from –3 to +3 to represent very wet, wet, good rains, normal, dry, drought, and severe drought. The regionalization is based on 90 geographical regions shown via studies of the modern precipitation record to be climatically homogeneous with respect to the interannual variability of rainfall. The regional aggregation allows the voluminous fragmentary information available in historical sources to be used systematically to produce multi-year time series that can be directly integrated into the modern record for each region. The resultant time series can also be subjected to statistical analysis, in order to investigate nineteenth century climate over Africa. Spatial detail is added to the data set by utilizing a unique methodology based on climatic teleconnections established from studies of rainfall variability over Africa. The historical information and station records have been combined into a file containing a regional anomaly value for up to 90 geographic regions and the years 1801–1900. Gaps necessarily remain in the matrix, but as early as the 1820s over 40 regions are represented. By the 1880s generally around 70 regions or more are represented.     

Tree-ring reconstructed rainfall over the southeastern U.S.A. during the medieval warm period and little ice age

A 1053-year reconstruction of spring rainfall (March-June) was developed for the southeastern United States, based on three tree-ring reconstructions of statewide rainfall from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. This regional reconstruction is highly correlated with the instrumental record of spring rainfall (r = +0.80; 1887–1982), and accurately reproduces the decade-scale departures in spring rainfall amount and variance witnessed over the Southeast during the past century. No large-magnitude centuries-long trends in spring rainfall amounts were reconstructed over the past 1053 years, but large changes in the interannual variability of spring rainfall were reconstructed during portions of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), Little Ice Age (LIA), and the 20th century. Dry conditions persisted at the end of the 12th century, but appear to have been exceeded by a reconstructed drought in the mid-18th century. High interannual variability, including five extremely wet years were reconstructed for a 20-yr period during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and may reflect amplified atmospheric circulation over eastern North America during what appears to have been one of the most widespread cold episodes of the Little Ice Age.     

短时强降水诊断物理量敏感性的点对面检验

对诊断物理量的准确认识可以帮助提高短时强降水的预报准确率,并帮助理解产生短时强降水的可能机制。考虑我国降水观测网的布设特点,结合NCEP最终分析资料的物理量场,以大气水汽总量和最优抬升指数为例,通过点对面检验分析了多个用于表征短时强降水环境特征的诊断物理量的敏感性。结果表明:常规的点对点检验是点对面检验的特殊情况。大气水汽总量和最优抬升指数对短时强降水的指示均存在最佳阈值,且140 km范围内的大气状况才对某点3 h内能否出现短时强降水有直接影响。对于水平分辨率为1°×1°的NCEP资料,建议点对面检验的搜索半径和记录数阈值分别为140 km和2个记录。对多个诊断物理量对比分析显示,短时强降水对水汽相关量最为敏感,其次是表征热力条件的物理量,而表征动力条件和垂直风切变的量的指示意义不够显著。     

Developing seasonal rainfall scenarios for food security early warning

Rainfed agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 95 % of the local cereal production, impacting hundreds of millions of people. Early identification of poor rainfall conditions is a critical indicator of food security. As such, monitoring accumulated seasonal rainfall gives an important mid-season estimate of final accumulated totals. However, characterizing the remaining uncertainty in a season has largely been ignored by the food security community. This paper presents a new technique describing rainfall conditions over the duration of a crop-growing cycle by combining estimated rainfall-to-date with potential scenarios for the remaining season based on available satellite rainfall estimates, the common tool for rainfall analysis in Africa. The limited historical record provided by satellite rainfall estimates using previous seasons provides only a coarse view of likely seasonal totals. To combat this, scenarios developed by bootstrapping dekadal data to create synthetic seasons allow for a finer understanding of potential seasonal accumulations. Updating this throughout the season shows a narrowing envelope of seasonal totals, converging on the final seasonal result. The resulting scenarios inform the expectations for the final seasonal rainfall accumulation, allowing analysts to quantify and visualize the uncertainty in seasonal totals. Giving decision makers a tool for understanding the likelihood of specific rainfall amounts provides additional time to enact and mobilize efforts to reduce the impact of agricultural drought.     

Climatic change in southern Africa: Past and present conditions and possible future scenarios

A brief review of climatic changes over the last 800 000 years in southern Africa is presented. The greatest emphasis is placed on those changes occurring during the Holocene and the period of meteorological record. Twentieth-century rainfall variations and their spatial manifestations are examined, and scenarios of possible future conditions are presented.     

Temporal and spatial variation of rainfall anomalies in Africa south of latitude 22° during the period of meteorological record

Annual rainfall anomalies over Africa south of 22° are shown to have exhibited a striking degree of organisation in both time and space during the period of meteorological record. Since the beginning of the twentieth century eight regularly alternating wet and dry spells of nine to ten years duration are shown to have occurred in association with a widespread quasi 20-year rainfall oscillation; before the turn of the century at least three spells occurred and more may have. For each wet or dry spell the spatial variation of rainfall over southern Africa is presented.Visiting from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.     

A mechanism for land–ocean contrasts in global monsoon trends in a warming climate

A central paradox of the global monsoon record involves reported decreases in rainfall over land during an era in which the global hydrologic cycle is both expected and observed to intensify. It is within this context that this work develops a physical basis for both interpreting the observed record and anticipating changes in the monsoons in a warming climate while bolstering the concept of the global monsoon in the context of shared feedbacks. The global-land monsoon record across multiple reanalyses is first assessed. Trends that in other studies have been taken as real are shown to likely be spurious as a result of changes in the assimilated data streams both prior to and during the satellite era. Nonetheless, based on satellite estimates, robust increases in monsoon rainfall over ocean do exist and a physical basis for this land–ocean contrast remains lacking. To address the contrast’s causes, simulated trends are therefore assessed. While projections of total rainfall are inconsistent across models, the robust land–ocean contrast identified in observations is confirmed. A feedback mechanism is proposed rooted in the facts that land areas warm disproportionately relative to ocean, and onshore flow is the chief source of monsoonal moisture. Reductions in lower tropospheric relative humidity over land domains are therefore inevitable and these have direct consequences for the monsoonal convective environment including an increase in the lifting condensation level and a shift in the distribution of convection generally towards less frequent and potentially more intense events. The mechanism is interpreted as an important modulating influence on the “rich-get-richer” mechanism. Caveats for regional monsoons exist and are discussed.     

Trends in Canadian Short‐Duration Extreme Rainfall: Including an Intensity–Duration–Frequency Perspective

Short-duration (5 minutes to 24 hours) rainfall extremes are important for a number of purposes, including engineering infrastructure design, because they represent the different meteorological scales of extreme rainfall events. Both single location and regional analyses of the changes in short-duration extreme rainfall amounts across Canada, as observed by tipping bucket rain gauges from 1965 to 2005, are presented. The single station analysis shows a general lack of a detectable trend signal, at the 5% significance level, because of the large variability and the relatively short period of record of the extreme short-duration rainfall amounts. The single station 30-minute to 24-hour durations show that, on average, 4% of the total number of stations have statistically significant increasing amounts of rainfall, whereas 1.6% of the cases have significantly decreasing amounts. However, regional spatial patterns are apparent in the single station trend results. Thus, for the same durations regional trends are presented by grouping the single station trend statistics across Canada. This regional trend analysis shows that at least two-thirds of the regions across Canada have increasing trends in extreme rainfall amounts, with up to 33% being significant (depending on location and duration). Both the southwest and the east (Newfoundland) coastal regions generally show significant increasing regional trends for 1- and 2-hour extreme rainfall durations. For the shortest durations of 5–15 minutes, the general overall regional trends in the extreme amounts are more variable, with increasing and decreasing trends occurring with similar frequency; however, there is no evidence of statistically significant decreasing regional trends in extreme rainfall amounts. The decreasing regional trends for the 5- to 15-minute duration amounts tend to be located in the St. Lawrence region of southern Quebec and in the Atlantic provinces. Additional analysis using criteria specified for traditional water management practice (e.g., Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF)) shows that fewer than 5.6% and 3.4% of the stations have significant increasing and decreasing trends, respectively, in extreme annual maximum single location observation amounts. This indicates that at most locations across Canada the traditional single station IDF assumption that historical extreme rainfall observations are stationary (in terms of the mean) over the period of record for an individual station is not violated. However, the trend information is still useful complementary information that can be considered for water management purposes, especially in terms of regional analysis.     

登陆华南台风特异—特弱或特强降水发生的环境条件

本文采用1979～1988年登陆华南台风逐日雨区各站日雨量资料、台风中心附近的探空资料和雨区附近的地形资料，用对比度分析方法研究了登陆台风过程的特弱降水和特强降水发生的环境条件，结果发现这两种特异降水发生的环境条件是迥然不同的，文中还对一些重要结果作了讨论。     

“21·7”河南特大暴雨气象和水文雨量观测对比

2021年“21·7”河南特大暴雨打破我国大陆小时气象观测纪录,该极端天气事件位列2021年中国十大天气气候事件第2位。已有研究使用气象地面站雨量观测资料对此次过程进行雨情分析和极值统计,但降水时空分布不均匀,单一来源资料存在不确定性。通过对比气象站和水文站雨量资料,分析两套业务观测系统记录“21·7”河南特大暴雨过程的异同,发现气象站和水文站雨量在时间和空间分布上具有很好的一致性,两者不同等级的累积降雨落区、逐日和逐时降雨演变趋势均一致性强,但累积雨量和雨强极值的空间分布和数值存在差异,两套资料在暴雨中心（过程雨量大于600 mm）的系统性偏差小于1%。气象站和水文站的融合资料呈现比单一资料更细致的降雨分布、更全面的演变特征。此外,基于融合资料发现累积雨量排名前3位的城市（郑州、鹤壁、新乡）均具有累积雨量大、小时雨强极强、强降雨集中、雨强突然增长的特征,鹤壁和新乡最强降雨时段分别比郑州晚26 h和28 h。     

Trend analysis of rainfall and temperature and its relationship over India

This study investigated the trends in rainfall and temperature and the possibility of any rational relationship between the trends over the homogeneous regions over India. Annual maximum temperature shows an increasing trend in all the homogeneous temperature regions and corresponding annual rainfall also follow the same pattern in all the regions, except North East. As far as monthly analysis is concerned, no definite pattern has been observed between trends in maximum and minimum temperature and rainfall, except during October. Increasing trends of maximum and minimum temperature during October accelerate the water vapor demand and most of the lakes, rivers, ponds and other water bodies with no limitation of water availability during this time fulfills the water vapor demand and shows an increasing trend of rainfall activity. This study shows there exists no direct relationship between increasing rainfall and increasing maximum temperature when monthly or seasonal pattern is concerned over meteorological subdivisions of India, however we can make a conclusion that the relation between the trends of rainfall and temperature have large scale spatial and temporal dependence.     

Causes and predictability of the record wet east Australian spring 2010

In 2010 eastern Australia received its highest springtime (September–November) rainfall since 1900. Based on historical relationships with sea surface temperatures (SST) and other climate indices, this record rainfall in 2010 was shown to be largely commensurate with the occurrence of a very strong La Niña event and an extreme positive excursion of the SAM. The pattern and magnitude of the tropical SST anomalies in austral spring 2010 were diagnosed to be nearly perfect to produce high rainfall across eastern Australia. Key aspects of this SST pattern were the strong cold anomaly in the central equatorial Pacific, and the strong warm anomalies in the eastern Indian Ocean and the far western Pacific to the north of Australia. Although the recent upward trend in SSTs in the western Pacific/eastern Indian Ocean warm pool accounted for about 50 % of the SST anomaly surrounding northern Australia in 2010, the contribution by the warming trend in these SSTs to the Australian rainfall anomaly in 2010 was assessed to be relatively modest. The strong positive swing in SAM was estimated to have accounted for upwards of 40 % of the regional anomaly along the central east coastal region and about 10 % of the area mean anomaly across eastern Australia. This contribution by the SAM suggests that a significant portion of the rainfall in 2010 may not have been seasonally predictable. However, predictability arising from the promotion of high SAM by the extreme La Nina event can not be ruled out.     

浙江中西部一次大范围降水过程的多普勒雷达资料分析

运用多普勒天气雷达和天气图资料,对2006年7月6日出现在浙江中西部的1次大面积强降水过程进行了分析,探讨了多普勒天气雷达资料在大面积降水过程中的图像特征。发现在不同的降水时段,垂直风廓线(VWP)产品和径向速度PPI图像都表现出非常明显的特征。利用EVAD技术和变分法计算的散度和垂直速度产品,能比较直观地反映这次过程中大气各层辐合、辐散和垂直运动情况,并以此对浙江大面积降水过程发生、发展、维持和消亡的动力学机制进行了探讨。     

Changing Gradients of Climate Change in Southern Africa during the Past Millennium: Implications for Population Movements

Climates of equatorial East Africa and subtropical Southern Africa have varied inversely over long periods of time. The high-resolution ¹⁸O stalagmite record from Cold Air Cave in the Makapansgat valley in South Africa and a similar resolution lake-level record for Lake Naivasha in Kenya have been in anti-phase for much of the last thousand years. A similar relationship is evident in the twentieth century meteorological record. The changes in rainfall in the two regions on multi-decadal to centennial scales have influenced both settlement patterns and livelihoods of Iron Age agriculturalists. The resulting latitudinal gradient of change may have been a significant factor in promoting southward migration of Sotho-Tswana speaking people from equatorial East Africa during the first few centuries of the last millennium and earlier. This would have occurred at times when environments in the north were deteriorating and those to the south were ameliorating.     

Effect of merging of the convective cloud clusters on occurrence of heavy rainfall

Sun et al., (1983) have given some favourable environmental conditions and have shown that there are four common features in convective rainstorms. In this paper, an important process of evolution of cloud systems was re-vealed when heavy rainfall occurred based on the diagnostic analysis of heavy rainfall cases. When the different cloud systems merge into a large one, the mesoscale heavy rainfall occurs and enhances. In other words, the process of evo-lution of cloud systems emphasized in this paper is the process of interaction between two cloud systems when the heavy rainfall occurs. The favourable environmental condition is also investigated.     

A study of partitioning Q vector on background conditions of a torrential rainfall over Shanghai, China on 25 August 2008

A rainfall that occurred during 0200–1400 Beijing Standard Time(BST)25 August 2008 shows the rapid development of a convective system,a short life span,and a record rate of 117.5 mm h-1for Xujiahui station since 1872.To study this torrential rainfall process,the partitioning method of Q vector is developed,in which a moist Q vector is first separated into a dry ageostrophic Q vector(DQ)and a diabatic-heating component.The dry ageostrophic Q vector is further partitioned along isothermal lines in the natural...     

“7·20”郑州特大暴雨的多模式对比及高分辨率区域模式预报分析

7月20日郑州遭遇特大暴雨，郑州站单日降水量（552.5 mm）和1 h降水量（201.9 mm）皆打破了该站建站以来的历史纪录。本文采用地面降水观测、静止卫星观测、再分析资料和数值模式预报数据对此次过程开展了多模式预报偏差原因分析和江苏省精细化天气分析和预报系统（Precision Weather Analysis and Forecasting System，PWAFS）的极端强降水预报能力分析。主要结论：1）此次暴雨过程因副热带高压西伸与台风”烟花”加强使二者之间的东风急流加强，并叠加地形的抬升作用而引起，前者提供了大尺度水汽条件，后者提供了局部动力条件；2）欧洲中期天气预报中心（European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasts，ECMWF）模式和美国国家环境预报中心全球预报系统（Global Forecast System，GFS）的降水落区较好，中心略偏北，但强度显著偏低。PWAFS模式预报的降水量级高于全球模式，且具有沿地形分布的特征，但存在降水位置偏西和降水范围更为孤立等问题。3）结合再分析资料和PWAFS预报，对应此次强降水区域，7月20日白天存在中低层切变发展成闭合低压系统的过程，为对流发展提供了动力条件。     

鄂尔多斯短时强降水报警系统

鄂尔多斯短时强降水报警系统采用VB语言和Access数据库进行开发,依托于中尺度观测系统的观测资料,对实时雨情进行查询统计,超出降水阈值的站点进行记录并发出声音报警,以提醒预报员密切关注强降水区域及趋势,更好地提供短临预报服务,从而最大程度地降低工矿区及农牧民朋友的灾害损失。