Journal article
Attributing drivers of the 2016 Kenyan drought
- Abstract:
- In 2016 and continuing into 2017, Kenya experienced drought conditions, with over three million people in need of food aid due to low rainfall during 2016. Whenever extreme events like this happen, questions are raised about the role of climate change and how natural variability such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation influenced ˜ the likelihood and intensity of the event. Here we aim to quantify the relative contributions of different climate drivers to this drought by applying three independent methodologies of extreme event attribution. Analysing precipitation data for the southeast and northwest of Kenya we found no consistent signal from human-induced climate change and thus conclude that it has not greatly affected the likelihood of low rainfall such as in 2016. However 2016 was a La Nina year and we show that this event was indeed more likely because of the specific ˜ sea-surface temperatures. There is a trend in temperatures in the region due to climate change that may have exacerbated the effects of this drought. By analysing precipitation minus evaporation and soil moisture, simulated by one climate model only, we did not see a reduction in moisture in simulations in the current climate compared with simulations without climate change. However, there are expected effects of higher temperatures that our simulations do not cover, such as increased demand on water resources and stress on livestock. Although we find no significant influence of climate change on precipitation, we cannot rule out that temperature-related impacts of drought are linked to human-induced climate change
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 7.2MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1002/joc.5389
Authors
- Publisher:
- Royal Meteorological Society
- Journal:
- International Journal of Climatology More from this journal
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- S1
- Pages:
- e554-e568
- Publication date:
- 2017-12-22
- Acceptance date:
- 2017-11-24
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1097-0088
- ISSN:
-
0899-8418
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
pubs:796593
- UUID:
-
uuid:6db0e4b7-df58-4f06-b686-94620409fffd
- Local pid:
-
pubs:796593
- Source identifiers:
-
796593
- Deposit date:
-
2017-11-24
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Uhe et al
- Copyright date:
- 2017
- Notes:
-
Copyright © 2017 The Authors. International Journal of Climatology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of the Royal Meteorological Society.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record