When will unusual heat waves become normal in a warming Africa?

By Simone Russo, A. F. Marchese, J. Sillmann, G. Immé. 2016

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change. In the upcoming decades the occurrence of longer, hotter and more frequent heat waves could have a strong impact on human mortality and crop production. Here, by applying the heat wave magnitude index daily to temperature reanalysis data, we quantify the magnitude and the spatial extent of the most extreme heat waves experienced in Africa between 1979 and October 2015 across different seasons. Results show that in the recent years Africa experienced hotter, longer and more extent heat waves than in the last two decades of the 20th century. In the future, 50% of regional climateprojections suggest that heat waves that are unusual under present climate conditions will occur on a regular basis by 2040 under the most severe IPCC AR5 scenario (i.e. RCP8.5).

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca0fbd8684c014377a1903ea5daf1562ffd7d5b6

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Citations in the corpus

Conservation implications of ecological responses to extreme weather and climate events (2018, background): “…the duration and intensity of droughts will increase in some regions of the world, including southern and central Europe, central North America, Central America and Mexico, north‐east Brazil and southern Africa (Handmer et al., 2012; Pohl et al., 2017; Russo et al., 2016; Seneviratne et al., 2012).”
The southern African climate under 1.5 °C and 2 °C of global warming as simulated by CORDEX regional climate models (2018, background): “This implies that those areas are projected to likely experience an increase in the magnitude and duration of heat-waves (e.g.Russo et al2016,Dosio2017,Déqué et al2017) and fire-risk, as suggested by Weatherly and Rosenbaum (2017).”