Climate Change Escalated Deadly Storms in Africa in Early 2022
Climate change intensified the rainfalls that battered southeastern Africa. Subsequently two powerful storms killed hundreds of individuals in early 2022.
Heavy rains brought about hundreds of fatalities and extensive damage
A lack of regional data made it tough to determine just how large of a role climate change played, researchers said on April 11 at a news conference.
So the findings were detailed in a research, published online on April 11 by a consortium of climate researchers and disaster experts called the World Weather Attribution network.
A collection of tropical storms and heavy rain events, damaged southeast Africa in fast succession from January through March. For this research, the scientists concentrated on two occasions.
First, the Tropical Storm Ana, which resulted in flooding in northern Madagascar, Malawi, and Mozambique in January. And also killed approximately 70 individuals. Later, the Cyclone Batsirai, which flooded southern Madagascar in February and caused hundreds more deaths.
The fingerprints of climate change
In order to search for the fingerprints of climate change. The group initially chose three days of heavy rain for each storm. So the researchers attempted to collect observational data from the region to reconstruct historical daily rainfall records from 1981 to 2022.
In Mozambique, just four weather stations had consistent, high-quality data covering those decades. Utilizing the data on hand, the group constructed simulations for the region that represented climate with and without human-generated greenhouse gas emissions.
The aggregate of those simulations showed that climate change did contribute to escalating the rains. Izidine Pinto, a climatologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said at the news event. However, with insufficient historical rainfall data, Pinto claimed that the team “could not quantify the specific contribution” of climate change.
The research study highlights exactly how information on extreme weather events “is very much biased towards the Global North … [whereas] there are big voids in the Global South,” stated climate scientist Friedericke Otto of Imperial College London.
Read the original article on Science News.
Read more: NASA at Your Table: Climate Change and Its Ecological Influence On Plant Growth.
