Abstract
There is a general lack of information about the potential effects of 1.5, 2 or more degrees of global warming on the regional climates within Africa, and most studies that address this use data from coarse resolution global models. Using a large ensemble of CORDEX Africa simulations, we present a pan-African overview of the effects of 1.5 and 2 °C global warming levels (GWLs) on the African climate. The CORDEX simulations, consistent with their driving global models, show a robust regional warming exceeding the mean global one over most of Africa. The highest increase in annual mean temperature is found over the subtropics and the smallest one over many coastal regions. Projected changes in annual mean precipitation have a tendency to wetter conditions in some parts of Africa (e.g. central/eastern Sahel and eastern Africa) at both GWLs, but models’ agreement on the sign of change is low. In contrast to mean precipitation, there is a consistent increase in daily precipitation intensity of wet days over a large fraction of tropical Africa emerging already at 1.5 °C GWL and strengthening at 2 °C. A consistent difference between 2 °C and 1.5 °C warmings is also found for projected changes in annual mean temperature and daily precipitation intensity. Our study indicates that a 0.5 °C further warming (from 1.5 °C–2 °C) can indeed produce a robust change in some aspects of the African climate and its extremes.
Highlights
Discussions about setting goals to limit global warming by a predefined threshold have been actively ongoing since the middle of the 1990s when what was termed as tolerable global temperature window was introduced at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) the First Conference of the Parties (COP) to in Berlin in 1995 (WBGU 1995).The upper end of this range is close to 2 ◦C above the global mean temperature during pre-industrial times and, the ‘2 ◦C target’ has attracted much attention at international climate conferences and negotiations aiming to avoid dangerous climate change
In order to take into account this issue, first we evaluate how the CORDEX Africa subset of the CMIP5 Global Climate Models (GCMs) represents the grand CMIP5 ensemble in terms of timing of global warming levels (GWLs)
For the first time, we used the largest available CORDEX Africa ensemble to provide a panAfrican overview on how temperature and precipitation on annual scale may change at the 1.5◦ and 2 ◦C global warming levels
Summary
Grigory Nikulin1,16 , Chris Lennard , Alessandro Dosio , Erik Kjellstrom , Youmin Chen, Andreas Hansler, Marco Kupiainen, Rene Laprise, Laura Mariotti, Cathrine Fox Maule8,15 , Erik van Meijgaard, Hans-Jurgen Panitz, John F Scinocca and Samuel Somot
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
