Mittwoch, 15. Juni 2022, 13:00 - 14:30 iCal
Vortrag von Michela BIASUTTI
(Columbia University)
""Climate Change in the Sahel: What happened? What will happen? How should we prepare?"
Vortrag im Rahmen des Meteorologisch-Geophysikalischen Kolloquiums.
Room 2F513, (Exner-Raum)
Josef-Holaubek-Platz 2, UZA 2, 1090 Wien
Lecture
Abstract: The Sahel extends from Senegal to Ethiopia. It's a ribbon of semi-arid land at the edge of the Sahara desert, where livelihoods are especially vulnerable to climate shocks. The Sahel drought of the 1970s and 1980s was so unique — severe, widespread, and long-lasting — that it has often been cited as an example of a man-made disaster, imputed first to local land-use practices and later to global climate change. We investigate a hierarchy of climate models to confirm the role of global climate over local forcings and to try to attribute the 20th century drought to either emissions of greenhouse gasses, or emissions of other pollutants, or simply the chaotic ups and downs of natural variability. The models suggest that pollutants from the US and Europe were implicated in the drought, but a more quantitative assessment is hampered by the mismatch between the historical record and the coupled model simulations.
This leaves us with the question of how to use projections of climate change in the area: Given their less-then-stellar performance in reproducing the past, how much should we trust the models’ forecast of the future? Can we use current climate projections to drive impact models and stress-test adaptation options? How should we interpret inter-model disagreements in the climate forecast? We present examples of how to use current climate projections to guide adaptation to a warming climate in ways that take advantage of the most robust aspects of the projections, without shying away from their uncertainty.
Zur Webseite der Veranstaltung
Veranstalter
Institut für Meteorologie und Geophysik
Kontakt
Andreas Plach/Herta Gassner
Institut für Meteorologie und Geophysik
53735
img-wien@univie.ac.at
Erstellt am Donnerstag, 02. Juni 2022, 09:05
Letzte Änderung am Montag, 13. Juni 2022, 07:52