Pollution in Northern Hemisphere helped cause 1980s African drought

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/06/06/pollution-in-northern-hemisphere-helped-cause-1980s-african-drought/

[font face=Serif]June 6, 2013

[font size=5]Pollution in Northern Hemisphere helped cause 1980s African drought[/font]

By Hannah Hickey

[font size=3]Decades of drought in central Africa reached their worst point in the 1980s, causing Lake Chad, a shallow lake used to water crops in neighboring countries, to almost dry out completely.

…

New University of Washington research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the drought was caused at least in part by Northern Hemisphere air pollution.

Aerosols emanating from coal-burning factories in the United States and Europe during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere, shifting tropical rain bands south. Rains no longer reached the Sahel region, a band that spans the African continent just below the Sahara desert.

When clean-air legislation passed in the U.S. and Europe, the rain band shifted back, and the drought lessened.

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[tk2kewl]

1. K&R

[dipsydoodle]

2. I've read about this in the past

Its also associated with the subject of global dimming. In the case of Africa it was Europe's fault but our clean air acts helped sort the problem we'd caused at such a distance.

[Socialistlemur]

3. Maybe the rain band shifted due to warming?

I've seen some AR5 data and it shows a wetter North Africa. I may have read the data wrong, but it attributes a speed up in the hydrological cycle and higher humidity to the warming observed until about 13-15 years ago. The world hasn't warmed ad I saw a Norwegian prediction for a slight cooling in the medium term, so maybe the increases in rainfall may not be as strong as predicted?