Leveraging CMIPS and NASA/GMAO Coupled Modeling Capacity for SERVIR East Africa Climate Projections.

DESCRIPTION: The proposal seeks to leverage improved global climate modeling capabilities, hydrometeorological data sets, and reanalyzes to narrow uncertainties in projecting the exposure of the SERVIR East African community to climate variability and climate change. Specifically the project will: use CMIP 5 models to examine climate variability over East Africa; evaluate the skill of NASA's Experimental Intraseasonal to Interannual Prediction System; and use these resources and others to develop an array of hydrometeorological scenarios.

OUTCOMES: Progress has been made in understanding how East African climate variability is related to SST in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Decadal SST data has been reconstructed and connected to precipitation variations which has shown that the post-1999 drying trend is consistent with SST in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Found that Climate model results strongly support observational analysis in linking rainfall to SST in the tropical Pacific.