Top Stories
Where's My Seasonal Tornado Forecast?
The nation's experts on tornadoes, derechos and other types of "severe convection" had a two-day meeting of the minds earlier this month at Columbia's Lamont campus to discuss ways of advancing our poor understanding of how these storms form and their relation to climate change. They also presented the latest efforts at predicting these events on a practical scale.
IRI Names New Deputy Director
Haresh Bhojwani has been appointed to be IRI's Deputy Director. He will coordinate the institute's connections with development and humanitarian organizations so that its research can target the needs of those vulnerable to climate impacts, especially through international collaborations.
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A new study in Nature Climate Change looks at the reliability of using existing observational data to validate long-term climate model simulations of the Pacific Walker circulation--which drives many important rainfall and temperature patterns around the world. The authors show that data from the first half of 20th century are generally unreliable for the analysis due to a sparsity of observations. More recent observations show signs of a strengthening Walker circulation, contrary to many model results.
"The study shows the fundamental need for quality climate observations in order to validate climate model results," says IRI's Brad Lyon, one of the study's coauthors.
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Burkina Faso, as with the rest of the Sahel, was plagued by recurring droughts from the late1960s through the 1990s. But in the decades that came before, the region saw above normal rainfall. Analyzing the differences between these two anomalous periods, researchers show that the dry one was characterized by rainy seasons that ended earlier and had a fewer total number of rainy days.
In addition, they also show that since the 1970s, rainfall in the region has been steadily increasing, but that it's coming in more intense episodes--a hallmark of climate change.
"For the first time we have a rigorous analysis of what farmers have been saying: the rains are becoming more volatile," says coauthor Alessandra Giannini.
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