Rainstorm-scale predictions of climate impacts on the water balance in East African drylands

Climate change presents great challenges for dryland regions, especially in communities where socioeconomic livelihoods are tied to the consistency of seasonal rainfall such as in the dryland regions of East Africa.

A key climatic feature of drylands is short-duration precipitation extremes and high spatio-temporal variability of storms.

However, most dryland regions around the world tend to have sparse precipitation gauge data, so coarse-resolution (daily, weekly, or monthly) gridded datasets are used even though they may not preserve the storm characteristics during individual events.

The temporal resolution of rainfall has been shown to significantly impact predicted soil moisture in drylands (Kipkemoi et al., 2021).

Additionally, climate models used to assess future changes in rainfall are also typically coarse resolution (10-100km) and unable to capture short-duration rainfall characteristics.

This disconnect between the resolution of available rainfall data and the characteristics of dryland precipitation, therefore, creates challenges in predicting climate impacts on regional water and food security in drought-prone drylands.