Since late October and continuing in November, heavy rain has caused significant flooding across Somalia, parts of Ethiopia, and Kenya. Floodlist has reported widespread loss and damage to crops, hundreds of livestock lives lost, uncountable wildlife lives lost, and at least forty human deaths reported so far. Disease looms. The situation is not expected to improve anytime soon.
El Nino has impacted the region since June, and heavy rainfall will not likely improve in Kenya until at least February 2024, according to Relief Org.
The El Niño season began in June 2023 and is expected to continue until at least February 2024. Kenya is in one of the regions where flooding has historically been higher during this climatic phenomenon , the effects of El Niño are anticipated to be amplified due to the forecast of a positive Indian Ocean dipole, leading to above-average rainfall in most parts of the country and a severe risk of flooding.
The whole country is likely to be impacted, particularly in the plains of the Lake Victoria basin, the counties bordering the Tana river, as well as in urban areas with poor drainage systems. Over the coming months, the El Niño conditions are expected to strengthen, particularly in the north-eastern counties and along the coast leading Mandera and Wajir counties, as well as parts of Marsabit, Isiolo and Garissa counties to have a 85% probability of receiving above-normal rainfall.
During the previous El Niño episode (2019), severe flooding and massive landslides led to the destruction of property and essential infrastructure, crop and livestock losses, and increased epidemics, particularly of cholera, affecting more than 330,000 people in the country and resulting in the displacement of 160,000 people. As Kenya is emerging from a drought emergency, described as the worst in 40 years, and experienced severe flooding during the last long rains season (March-May), the El Niño's destructive effects represent a major threat to access to food, drinkable water and other basic needs. The Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASAL) counties are at particular risk, with 2.8 million people suffering from acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) following back-to-back climatic shocks . Wetter than usual conditions are also likely to result in epidemics, while 12,000 cases of cholera have already been reported.
Though misery and death are expected to be severe, the rainfall may also affect easing the three-year-long drought in the Horn of Africa region.
Nasa’s Earth Observatory writes on one of the worst droughts in history.
The Horn of Africa has seen almost three years of some of worst drought conditions in history, according to the Famine and Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). Ethiopia and Somalia have had five failed rainy seasons since late 2020, which have displaced 1.4 million Somalis and killed 3.8 million livestock. During this time the Shabelle-Juba river basins saw their lowest rainfall totals since 1981.
“This flooding doesn’t just undo three years of drought,” Wainwright said. Her recent research into the drivers and impacts of rainfall variability in East Africa found that from the mid-1980s to 2010, the long rains have been getting drier. In fact, the research team’s analysis of climate projections found that the short rains could deliver more rainfall than the long rains by 2030–2040.
More than 1,000 hectares of cropland have been swamped by recent rains, challenging the agricultural economies in Ethiopia and Somalia. Agriculture employs 67 and 80 percent of people in these countries, respectively, and much of the farmland in the region is rain-fed. Although rainfall can provide some relief, intense rainfall following extensive drought can wash away crops and topsoil. Most of the farms in the area also lack the infrastructure to store water for future use.
“Normally, the long rains begin in Kenya and move north to Ethiopia and Somalia,” said Caroline Wainwright, a climate scientist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. “But this year, the rains started concurrently, and the last two weeks of March were incredibly wet in all three countries.”
The AGU writes on the sources of moisture in arid and semi-arid regions where life has struggled for a very long time to survive. Climate change will not help the situation. Note HAD=Horn of Africa Drought.
Rainfall in the HAD region is influenced by a complex set of factors including large-scale circulation patterns and oscillations combined with local dynamical and thermodynamic factors. Therefore, deriving new insights into the drivers of the HAD rainfall at multiple timescales is essential for improving its predictability. To this end, the study addressed two major research objectives: (a) to understand and quantify the relative contributions of different sources of rainfall to the trends in rainfall during two major rainfall seasons in the HAD region and (b) to quantify the role of the land in influencing HAD seasonal rainfall during and wet and dry periods.
In addressing these objectives, the study mapped the main sources of moisture associated with the north-east monsoon and the Somali low-level jet, the two main atmospheric circulation patterns which transport moisture to the HAD region. Specifically, ocean contributions amount to ˜80% of the HAD rainfall. Our results reveal that while land contributions, which amount to ˜20% of the HAD rainfall, are becoming increasingly important for the short rains in recent years, the importance of ocean contributions is increasing for the long rains. The relatively small but substantial moisture contribution from land during the two rain seasons highlights the importance of vegetation transpiration, interception loss, and soil evaporation as sources of rainfall. Further, our results highlight the complex combination of drivers (changes in source region evaporation, regional circulation patterns, and local atmospheric stability) that potentially drive the variability in long rains. Specifically, we find that during the long rains evaporation from the source region is anti-correlated with rainfall in the HAD. Unraveling the mechanisms behind this strong anti-correlation can provide insights into the decline of the long rains and thus the East African paradox.
The World Economic Forum reported on what the changing climate will do in the region. Some believed the region would get wetter and ease starvation. But a referenced 2015 study from Science Advances dismissed that outcome.
The Horn of Africa is becoming drier in step with global warming, researchers said on Friday, contradicting some climate models predicting rainier weather patterns in a region that has suffered frequent food crises linked to drought.
A new study using a sediment core extracted from the Gulf of Aden found the East African region covering Somalia, Djibouti and Ethiopia has dried at an unusually fast rate over the past century.
Lead author Jessica Tierney, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation the research team was confident the drying was linked to rising emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, and was expected to continue as the region heats up further.
“If the region becomes dry, like we think it might get, that completely changes your models for food security and agriculture,” she said.
Study co-author Peter deMenocal of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory warned that many aid groups are expecting “a wetter, greener future for the Horn of Africa”. But the new findings show “the exact opposite is occurring”.
Africa lacks early warning systems for heavy rainfall events. Africans have contibuted little to global warming, but suffer some of the worst impacts. Could wealthy nations build more weather stations for them? I’m not holding my breath.
According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United States and the European Union combined have 636 weather radar stations for a population of 1.1 billion, while Africa, with a population of 1.2 billion, has just 37, which are unevenly distributed across the continent. The WMO also notes that some 60 percent of the African population is “not covered by early warning systems to cope with extreme weather and climate change.” What weather stations the continent does have are often so far apart that the data they collect is of limited use, and many of those stations are in need of repair. In fact, only one in five African weather stations met the WMO’s reporting standards in 2019, and the number of functional weather stations in Africa has been decreasing in recent decades due to a lack of maintenance.
Early warnings of an impending disaster give people a chance to seek shelter or evacuate. Compare 2021’s Hurricane Ida in the U.S. with 2019’s Tropical Cyclone Idai in East Africa: Both were Category 4 storms, but Ida killed fewer than 100 people, while Idai killed more than 1,000. Early warning was a key difference between the two disasters. “U.S. residents were alerted to evacuate before Hurricane Ida made landfall, [while] Cyclone Idai caught African populations by surprise,” scientists wrote in Nature.