Anthropogenic climate change is leading to rising temperatures and an increasing frequency of hot days across the globe. Evidence of recent trends is important to understand the rate of change and inform adaptation and mitigation policies. For Africa, our current understanding of change is limited. This study has analysed temperature and hot day trends at gridpoint scale and regional area averages, while return periods of the annual maximum temperature was examined over regional domains. The representation of these trends and events were compared between 5 observation-based datasets. All regions of Africa saw robust evidence of warming inannual mean maximum temperature, with the largest trend occurring over parts of north west and south west Africa, where trends could be exceeding 0.5°C a decade. However, there was uncertainty in the magnitude of warming, in addition to the spatial representation of the areas seeing the largest increases. At seasonal timescales, the uncertainty in the sign and magnitude of trends increased at gridpoint and regionalarea average spatial scales, compared to annual means. The frequency and intensity of hot days has been shown to be increasing for nearly all African regions, with uncertainty in magnitude of these trends. However, a robust increasing trend was identified in Central Africa, a region historically lacking evidence of changes to hot extremes. Examining the return periods of the hottest annual temperatures, differences in the intensity of these events were present between the datasets. This study finds that the choice of dataset influences the representation of absolute temperature and trends in the characteristics of extreme heat events. Future projection work should seek to account for this uncertainty through the use of multiple observational datasets.
Recent temperature changes over Africa from multiple observational productsGreen, D. (Author). 21 Mar 2023
Student thesis: Master's Thesis › Unspecified Master's Degree