Attributing drivers of the 2016 Kenyan drought

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In 2016 and continuing into 2017, Kenya experienced drought conditions, with over 3 million people in need of food aid due to low rainfall during 2016. Whenever extreme events like this happen, questions are raised about the role of climate change and how natural variability such as the El Niño -Southern Oscillation influenced the likelihood and intensity of the event. Here we aim to quantify the relative contributions of different climate drivers to this drought by applying three independent methodologies of extreme event attribution. Analysing precipitation data for the South East and North West of Kenya we found no consistent signal from human-induced climate change and thus conclude that it has not greatly affected the likelihood of low rainfall such as in 2016. However, 2016 was a La Niña year and we show that this event was indeed more likely because of the specific sea surface temperatures. There is a trend in temperatures in the region due to climate change that may have exacerbated the effects of this drought. By analysing precipitation minus evaporation and soil moisture, simulated by one climate model only, we did not see a reduction in moisture in simulations in the current climate compared with simulations without climate change. However, there are expected effects of higher temperatures that our simulations do not cover, such as increased demand on water resources and stress on livestock. Although we find no significant influence of climate change on precipitation, we cannot rule out that temperature-related impacts of drought are linked to human-induced climate change.

Anthropogenic influence on the drivers of the Western Cape drought 2015–2017

“…Mishra andSingh 2010, Hao et al 2018) and notoriously difficult to attribute to anthropogenic climate change (e.g. Otto et al 2015, Martins et al 2018, Uhe et al 2017. The regional extent of the drought is not always consistent when looking from the point of view of the impacts and meteorological drivers.…”

On‐farm Performance and Farmers’ Perceptions of DroughtTEGO‐Climate‐Smart Maize Hybrids in Kenya

“…The longest drought spell was in 2016 SRS when the yields for both sets of DroughtTEGO hybrids and commercial hybrids were significantly lower when compared with the other seasons. According to Uhe et al (2017), there was severe drought in most parts of Kenya during October to December 2016 into early 2017. During the period, most farmers lost their maize crop to drought; and some farmers had zero yield.…”

Attributing high-impact extreme events across timescales—a case study of four different types of events

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