Abstract. The African continent is probably the one with the lowest density of hydrometric stations currently measuring river discharge, despite the fact that the number of operating stations was quite important until the 70s. This new African Database of Hydrometric Indices (ADHI) is compiling data from different sources carefully checked for quality control. It includes about 1500 stations with at least 10 years of daily discharge data over the period 1950–2018. The average record length is 19 years and for over 100 stations complete records are available over 50 years. With this dataset spanning most regions of the African continent, several hydrometric indices have been computed, representing mean flow characteristics and extremes (low flows and floods), and are made accessible to the scientific community. The database will be updated on a regular basis to include more hydrometric stations and longer time series of river discharge. The ADHI database is available for download at: https://doi.org/10.23708/LXGXQ9 (Tramblay and Rouché, 2020).
Seabed telecommunication cables can be damaged or broken by powerful seafloor flows of sediment (called turbidity currents), which may runout for hundreds of kilometres into the deep ocean. These flows have the potential to affect multiple cables near-simultaneously over very large areas, so it is more challenging to reroute traffic or repair the cables. However, cable-breaking turbidity currents that runout into the deep ocean were poorly understood, and thus hard to predict, as there were no detailed measurements from these flows in action. Here we present the first detailed measurements from such cable-breaking flows, using moored-sensors along the Congo Submarine Canyon offshore West Africa. These turbidity currents include the furthest travelled sediment flow (of any type) yet measured in action on Earth. The SAT-3 (South Atlantic 3) and WACs (West Africa Cable System) cables were broken on 14-16 th January 2020 by a turbidity current that accelerated from 5 to 8 m/s, as it travelled for > 1,130 km from river estuary to deep-sea, although a branch of the WACs cable located closer to shore survived. The SAT-3 cable was broken again on 9 th March 2020 due to a second turbidity current, this time slowing data transfer during regional coronavirus (COVID-2019) lockdown. These cables had not experienced faults due to natural causes in the previous 19 years. The two cable-breaking flows are associated with a major flood along the Congo River, which produced the highest discharge (72,000m 3 ) recorded at Kinshasa since the early 1960s, and this flood peak reached the river mouth on ~30 th December 2019. However, the cable-breaking turbidity currents occurred 2-10 weeks
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