Advancing understanding and modeling of climate processes for provision of deterministic climate information for sustainable development in Kenya and Eastern Africa

Abstract

The implications of climate variability and emerging climate change make East Africa particularly vulnerable region due to dependence of most socio-economic activities on highly variable climatic variables like rainfall which has relatively low predictability. Dynamical climate modelling for both operational climate information services like seasonal outlooks, and long-term projections has made notable improvements since 1990s. Models are the only tools for projecting the long-term future climate alongside provision of short-term information for planning and management of climate sensitive socio-economic activities like rain-fed agriculture and water resources. Using rainfall and moist circulation evaluation results, this study illustrates the “UM HadGEM-GC2” model give good indications of processes which quantify climate extremes namely floods and droughts over East Africa. Among the most important processes revealed in this study, vertically integrated moisture flux, which embraces both horizontal moisture transport into or out of East Africa with sufficient moist-air depth or dry atmospheric column are crucial mechanisms for occurrence of floods and droughts in Kenya and East Africa. Knowledge products like these can translate into mitigation and adaptation decisions in water resources, agriculture and food security. To model developers, processed based model evaluation outcomes like these reveals what physics and dynamics attributes to focus on in the formulation of next generation models and development of evaluation metrics.