Extending the African instrumental record to the early 19th century
This paper describes progress toward the production of a data set that extends the African climate record back to the beginning of the 19th century. Qualitative documentary evidence, lake-level fluctuations and other proxy indicators are combined with historical rainfall records to produce regional time series. The data set has relatively high temporal and spatial resolution. The conceptualization is based on a climatic regionalization produced using modern data and an anomaly method in previous historical reconstructions. The data set provides information for some 100 regions with a 1 to 5 year resolution for most of the nineteenth century. Three to five quantitative classes of rainfall are utilized in the data set. Here, the available information to produce this record is summarized. The methodology utilized to combine proxy data and observations to produce a quantitative rainfall data set is described. This historical data set is compared with actual rainfall records for select regions where both are available. This comparison indicates the reliability of the proxy African data set. An analysis of the historical record indicates that the main characteristics of rainfall variability evident in the modern African record are also apparent in the 19th century record. 5 figs.
- OSTI ID:
- 535507
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-970207-; TRN: 97:005076-0039
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 77. annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, Long Beach, CA (United States), 2-7 Feb 1997; Other Information: PBD: 1997; Related Information: Is Part Of Eighth symposium on global change studies; PB: 402 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Twentieth century dust lows and the weakening of the westerly winds over the Tibetan Plateau: Dust and the Westerlies over the TP
Use of ARM observations and numerical models to determine radiative and latent heating profiles of mesoscale convective systems for general circulation models