Future changes in convective storms across Africa in new km-scale climate scenarios

Africa is a uniquely vulnerable region.

Both drought and flooding are expected to increase in future with climate change [1], which is a major threat to rainfed agriculture, drinking water supplies, ecosystems and a risk to human life. These extremes are a manifestation of changes in convectively driven precipitation, which dominates across Africa.

However, despite their importance, our understanding of how the properties of convective storms will change in future is limited.

This is in part due to the relatively coarse resolution of traditional climate models, which provide a simplified representation of convection.

With increases in supercomputing power, we are now able to run very high resolution (km-scale) models that give a much better representation of convection and individual storms.

The first so called 'convection permitting' climate simulation for Africa (CP4A) was carried out as part of the IMPALA project [2] and provided new insights into future changes across Africa.

For example, it showed enhanced increases in both wet and dry precipitation extremes [3], of key importance for impacts.