Climate Change Impacts and Mitigation

The continent of Africa is expected to have a climate shift towards generally drier and warmer weather caused by the changing sea surface temperature. Warmer SST in the Indian Ocean has been linked to an increase in stable inversion layers in the atmosphere over the course of a year. Clouds struggle to form in a stable atmosphere because air is generally sinking, and cannot form at all in an inversion layer, which would be responsible for a decrease in rainfall over time. Large regions with little variability in climate such as the Sahel provide very little data for scientists to make an accurate prediction on future climate change in these areas. The climate in areas near the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (the southern coast of Africa) are also troublesome for scientists to predict because the ITCZ isn't always where the scientists predict it's going to be, yet they use their predicted data to estimate future climate change, which is inaccurate.

The continent of Africa is prone to climate change in the near future, yet it is a very poor continent with very little resources to adapt and help it's people deal with hardships. Many African people do not have a clean, reliable water source and by 2020, it is estimated that this problem will skyrocket into the hundreds of millions of people taking into account for the increasing population. As for food, agricultural production is expected to drop because of decreasing rainfall in the future climate, which decreases the amount of food available on an already starving continent. Africa will drain resource after resource until it has nothing left and is uninhabitable.

To put it simply, Africa is a region still trying to recover from many past events that left scarring impacts on almost every aspect of African society. This is not a region that is not ready to take on severe climate change because of the fact that Africa can barely, if even rely on its own resources to support it's people. Climate change can further hamper these resources that are already being depleted, which will inhibit and reverse efforts to make Africa the least bit self-sustainable. Lack of resources is the reason for illness and disease, and with the shrinking amount of inhabitable land, disease will spread quick and run rampant among the population, killing many African people.

The most interesting threat for Africa due to predicted future climate change is the increase in water stress for the people of Africa. Africa as it stands today is suffering from a severe drinking water shortage for their booming population. With the future climate change expecting to decrease rainfall, Africa will have even less available drinking water to distribute amongst and increasing amount of people. Water stress also relates to agriculture, as most of Africa's economy comes from agriculture, and is directly related to the amount of food available to the African people. With decreasing rainfall, crops will begin to die and areas once suitable for agriculture will become barren, and the people of Africa will starve even worse than they are now, if that's even possible.

map from http://www.mappery.com

courtesy of https://globalizationstudies.sas.upenn.edu

Severe Weather in Zimbabwe

Tornadoes are a type of severe weather that forms in a very unique fashion. The formation of tornadoes always occurs during a thunderstorms, during permitting conditions. Because of increasing wind speeds at higher altitudes and drag and friction caused by the surface (vertical wind sheer), a rotating body of air known as a vortex tube forms along the surface of earth. This horizontal column of air is lifted up and vertically by the warm updrafts of a thunderstorm and a "mesocyclone" forms. When this mesocyclone is fully developed in the updraft of a thunderstorm, it is now a tornado. Tornados in the United States travel in a northeast direction because this is the direction of the prevailing westerlies that affect most of the continental US. Very rarely do tornadoes occur in Zimbabwe because of it's unique location and how it is being shielded by Madagascar from the direct path of the NE trades. The average number of tornadoes that occur yearly in the US is 1253 (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado-climatology). The average number of tornadoes that occur yearly in Zimbabwe is hard to find, most likely because there is not a very high chance of running into a tornado in Zimbabwe.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/globdist.jpg

Although Zimbabwe is very close to a tornado hotspot over South Africa, it avoids these tornados and steers clear of this 'hotspot" because of Madagascar off the coast of Africa and how it blocks and diverts the prevailing wind direction, which would be where most of the tornados are coming from.Though tornado occurrences appeared to have increased over time, this may not be entirely true  because in the last 30 years, the methods that have developed in detecting and accounting for tornadoes have greatly improved. Because of this instead of the number of tornado occurrences going up, maybe it's just the number of tornadoes able to be detected has risen.

The three main requirements for a hurricane is : 1) warm ocean temperatures, at least 80 degrees fahrenheit or higher, 2) deep warm ocean layer (200 m deep, only occurs <20 degrees latitude) and 3) Coriolis effect to start the rotation (needs to occur within 5 degrees latitude of the equator). The three regions in which hurricanes occur is: 1) in the Atlantic and East Pacific (called hurricanes) 2) in the Indian Ocean near Australia (called cyclones) 3) off the coast of China and Indonesia (called typhoons).

http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/hurricanes/en/cyclone_map_large.en.gif

The general direction of Hurricanes in the US is normally in an eastern direction following the westerlies, though usually the hurricane starts off moving in a western direction because this is the direction of the trade winds where the hurricane originated. The general path of the hurricane follows the directions of the prevailing winds in the area. From it's place of origin up until the continental US, the wind direction completely flips, which gives hurricanes the appearance of changing directions. Again, hurricanes do not occur often or at all in Zimbabwe because of it's special location behind Madagascar, being shielded from the general direction of the wind and the path of the hurricanes. On the other hand, the United States averages 5.8 hurricanes per year, according to NOAA.