The effects of 1.5 and 2 degrees of global warming on Africa in the CORDEX ensemble

By Grigory Nikulin∗, C. Lennard, A. Dosio, E. Kjellström, Youmin Chen, Andreas Hänsler, Marco Kupiainen, René Laprise, L. Mariotti, C. F. Maule and 4 more. Environmental Research Letters, 2018

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is a general lack of information about the potential effects of 1.5, 2 or more degrees of global warming on the regional climates within Africa, and most studies that address this use data from coarse resolution global models. Using a large ensemble of CORDEX Africa simulations, we present a pan-African overview of the effects of 1.5 and 2 °C global warming levels (GWLs) on the African climate. The CORDEX simulations, consistent with their driving global models, show a robust regional warming exceeding the mean global one over most of Africa. The highest increase in annual mean temperature is found over the subtropics and the smallest one over many coastal regions. Projected changes in annual mean precipitation have a tendency to wetter conditions in some parts of Africa (e.g. central/eastern Sahel and eastern Africa) at both GWLs, but models’ agreement on the sign of change is low. In contrast to mean precipitation, there is a consistent increase in daily precipitation intensity of wet days over a large fraction of tropical Africa emerging already at 1.5 °C GWL and strengthening at 2 °C. A consistent difference between 2 °C and 1.5 °C warmings is also found for projected changes in annual mean temperature and daily precipitation intensity. Our study indicates that a 0.5 °C further warming (from 1.5 °C–2 °C) can indeed produce a robust change in some aspects of the African climate and its extremes.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b336eae33a320a87ab7b1b465a279eb7b6cc1330

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

The southern African climate under 1.5 °C and 2 °C of global warming as simulated by CORDEX regional climate models (2018, methodology): “The methodology for determining the timing when global warming levels (GWL) are reached and the quantification of the robustness of the climate change signals are are described in Nikulin et al (2018) of this focus collection.”
Future changes in precipitation extremes over Southeast Asia: insights from CMIP6 multi-model ensemble (2021, background): “…which in turn significantly influence natural ecosystems, water management, and agriculture in less-developed countries (Allen and Ingram 2002, Zhai et al 2005, Held and Soden 2006, Vecchi et al 2006, Hulme 2016, Marotzke et al 2017, Sillmann et al 2017, Chen and Sun 2018, Nikulin et al 2018).”