“To reduce the impacts of climate extremes, we need to look for opportunities,” said CHC Specialist and Operations Analyst Laura Harrison. In the new commentary and a longer paper currently at preprint stage and in review at Earth’s Future, the co-authors highlight, respectively, the opportunities associated with these long range outlooks, and the physical mechanisms explaining the predictability. “We’ve published about 15 scientific papers on this topic,” Funk said, “and we’ve forecasted dry seasons in 2016-2017, which helped prevent a famine that year.” As he discusses in his book “ Drought, Flood, Fire (Cambridge University Press, 2021),” “climate change amplifies natural sea surface temperature variations, which opens the door to better forecasts.” But as climate change increases western Pacific sea surface temperatures, it becomes more and more possible to predict devastating water shortages. These changes in moisture flows drive back-to-back droughts. They built on research showing that increased rainfall around Indonesia, caused by anthropogenic increases in sea surface temperatures, resulted in less moisture flowing on to the East African coast during the rainy months. In the intervening 10 years, the researchers have worked to discern and understand the broad, often distant mechanisms that drive drought in the Eastern Horn of Africa and create accurate, tailored forecasts for the region. “Now, following our success in 2016/17, and extensive outreach efforts, the humanitarian relief community appreciates the value of our early warning systems.” “We made an accurate forecast, but we didn’t understand very well what was going on scientifically,” Funk said. And to be fair, he added, the group’s long-range weather prediction capabilities were still in their infancy. While the models said East Africa would become wetter, observations showed substantial declines in the spring wet season. “It was just really horrible.”Īt the time, he said, the available forecasts weren’t able to predict rainfall deficits in this region. “More than 250,000 Somalis died,” Funk said. These efforts were a far cry from similar predictions of sequential droughts that the researchers, collaborating with the USAID-supported Famine Early Warning Systems Network, made for the same region ten years earlier. “We’ve gotten very good at making these predictions,” said Funk, who directs UCSB’s Climate Hazards Center, a multidisciplinary alliance of scientists who work to predict droughts and food shortages in vulnerable areas. ![]() In a commentary for the journal Earth’s Future, UC Santa Barbara climate scientist Chris Funk and co-authors assert that predicting the droughts that cause severe food insecurity in the Eastern Horn of Africa (Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia) is now possible, with months-long lead times that allow for measures to be taken that can help millions of the region’s farmers and pastoralists prepare for and adapt to the lean seasons. Science is beginning to catch up with and even get ahead of climate change. ![]() Through the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (which leverages expertise from USG science agencies, universities, and the private sector) and the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center, it has been possible to predict and monitor these climatic events, providing early warning of their impacts on agriculture to support humanitarian and resilience programming in the most food insecure countries of the world. Here are seven transformations that NASA has captured.In Africa, climate change impacts are experienced as extreme events like drought and floods. But these, too, are the result of weather patterns that have morphed over decades. Of course, there are also sudden, dramatic events like flash floods that overwhelm a region overnight. ![]() From one month to the next, an environmental change might seem slight, but when you zoom out to the level of years and decades, the combined shifts paint a devastating portrait. By the time ice shelves disappear, ocean waves creep onto main streets, and forests shrivel, the forces of climate change have been at work for decades.įortunately, NASA is tracking these environmental changes with satellites so that the public knows the full scale of transformations taking place. Climate change rarely transforms an environment overnight.
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