• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing January 23, 2023
Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’ January 23, 2023
Notley Scorches Federal Just Transition Bill as Fossil CEO Calls for Oilsands Boom January 23, 2023
IRON OXIDE: New Battery Brings Long-Duration Storage to Grids, 750 Jobs to West Virginia January 23, 2023
BREAKING: GFANZ Banks, Investors Pour Hundreds of Billions into Fossil Fuels January 17, 2023
Next
Prev

Warming climate increases Sahara’s spread

April 5, 2018
Reading time: 3 minutes
Primary Author: Tim Radford

 

Climate change means the Sahara’s spread is growing. And North Africa’s pattern of atmospheric change could affect other regions.

LONDON, 5 April, 2018 – The Sahara’s spread is now established. Its sands are on the march. The desert is growing, thanks to climate change.

  • Be among the first to read The Energy Mix Weekender
  • A brand new weekly digest containing exclusive and essential climate stories from around the world.
  • The Weekender:The climate news you need.
New!
Subscribe

In the last century the region of the Sahara technically defined as desert has increased by at least 10%. And the area that becomes technically desert – with less than 100mm of rain a year – has increased in summer, the wet season, over the same period by 16%.

And if climate change is at work in northern Africa, the same may hold true for some of the world’s other deserts as well, researchers warn.

US meteorologists report in the Journal of Climate that they looked at data from the years 1920 to 2013, to explore the annual trends.

Deserts are natural geographical features with no fixed boundaries: parts of them can bloom in rainier years, and support crops and even foraging animals, only to become extreme arid zones a year or two later.

“The Chad Basin falls in the region where the Sahara has crept southward. And the lake is drying out. It’s a very visible footprint of reduced rainfall not just locally, but across the whole region”

Deserts exist because of the natural circulation of the atmosphere: air rises at the equator and descends in the subtropics to flow back to the equator nearer ground level to establish a pattern of low precipitation: weather experts call this phenomenon the Hadley circulation, after the 18th century British natural philosopher George Hadley.

“Climate change is likely to widen the Hadley circulation causing northward advance of the subtropical deserts,” said Sumant Nigam, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at the University of Maryland, one of the authors of the study. “The southward creep of the Sahara however suggests that additional mechanisms are at work as well.”

The other factors probably linked to the shifts in the Sahara sands include a natural climate cycle known to oceanographers and meteorologists as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

Overlapping patterns

The headache for climate scientists is to distinguish one natural pattern of change from another, more alarming trend as a consequence of climate change, triggered by global warming as a consequence of the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels by human economies.

And such dissections are not simple: the Sahara expands in the arid winter and shrinks a little with the summer rains. Between the shifting dunes of the Sahara and the fertile savannas of tropical Africa lies the Sahel, a region that straddles 14 nations, from Senegal on the Atlantic coast, through Mali and Chad, to Ethiopia on the Red Sea.

Researchers have repeatedly warned that climate change could bring more famine to this precarious region. But other scientists have detected a trend towards increased rainfall that could make parts of the Sahel flourish again with climate change.

The latest study suggests that on the evidence of water levels in Lake Chad, overall conditions could become harsher for the meagre grasslands and impoverished communities of the Sahel.

Century-long trend

“The Chad Basin falls in the region where the Sahara has crept southward. And the lake is drying out. It’s a very visible footprint of reduced rainfall not just locally, but across the whole region,” said Professor Nigam. The scientists attribute about a third of the shift in the desert’s regime to human-induced climate change, the rest to other cyclic weather patterns.

Researchers have been examining desertification for decades, but this paper is claimed as the first to establish a trend over most of a century, according to Natalie Thomas of the University of Maryland, who led the study.

“Our priority was to document the long-term trends in rainfall and temperature in the Sahara. Our next step is to look at what is driving these trends, for the Sahara and elsewhere,” she said.

“We have already started looking at seasonal temperature trends over North America, for example. Here, winters are getting warmer but summers are about the same. In Africa, it’s the opposite – winters are holding steady but summers are getting warmer. So the stresses in Africa are already more severe.” – Climate News Network



in Climate News Network

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

U.S. Geological Survey/wikimedia commons
Biodiversity & Habitat

Climate Change Amplifies Risk of ‘Insect Apocalypse’

December 1, 2022
42
Alaa Abd El-Fatah/wikimedia commons
COP Conferences

Rights Abuses, Intrusive Conference App Put Egypt Under Spotlight as COP 27 Host

November 14, 2022
26
Western Arctic National Parklands/wikimedia commons
Arctic & Antarctica

Arctic Wildfires Show Approach of New Climate Feedback Loop

January 2, 2023
27

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

RL0919/wikimedia commons

Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing

January 23, 2023
2.1k
United Nations

Salvage of $20B ‘Floating Time Bomb’ Delayed by Rising Cost of Oil Tankers

January 27, 2023
25
@tongbingxue/Twitter

Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’

January 23, 2023
273
Rachel Notley/Facebook

Notley Scorches Federal Just Transition Bill as Fossil CEO Calls for Oilsands Boom

January 23, 2023
259
James Vincent Wardhaugh/flickr

Canada Sidelines Ontario’s Ring of Fire, Approves Separate Mining Project

December 4, 2022
379
Weirton, WV by Jon Dawson/flickr

IRON OXIDE: New Battery Brings Long-Duration Storage to Grids, 750 Jobs to West Virginia

January 23, 2023
495

Recent Posts

EcoAnalytics

Albertans Want a Just Transition, Despite Premier’s Grumbling

January 23, 2023
193
Sergio Boscaino/flickr

Dubai Mulls Quitting C40 Cities Over ‘Costly’ Climate Target

January 24, 2023
85
hangela/pixabay

New UK Coal Mine Faces Two Legal Challenges

January 24, 2023
44

Gas Stoves Enter U.S. Climate Culture War, Become ‘Bellwether’ for Industry

January 22, 2023
73
Jeff Hitchcock/flickr.

BREAKING: GFANZ Banks, Investors Pour Hundreds of Billions into Fossil Fuels

January 23, 2023
495

Exxon Had the Right Global Warming Numbers Through Decades of Denial: Study

January 17, 2023
223
Next Post

UK Start-Up Plans Ottawa HQ for Battery-Powered Driverless Pods

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}