Climate Data Information

Climate Change Impact Part 12: Example – Kagera Basin (Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania) Summary The Kagera basin flows into Lake Victoria and as such it forms part of the Nile Basin. An extensive data base of climate and flows was available and was used to calibrate the HYSIM hydrological model to 22 sub-basins. Climate projections show that rainfall is projected to increase but temperature (and hence evapotranspiration) is also expected to increase. Whilst the two changes to some extent balance out, the increase in temperature still has important implications for the future of agriculture. Introduction The Kagera River Basin and its tributaries flow within four countries (Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania). The Kagera River flows into Lake Victoria which in turn forms part of the Nile River Basin. The aim of the study was to assess the water resources potential of the basin and also to estimate the potential effect of climate change. Figure 1 is a map...

Climate Change Impact Part 10: Example –  Zambia Summary Zambia has a climate typical of Southern Africa with cool dry winters (June to August) with hot wet summers. The potential impact of climate change was studied as part of a project enhancing the country's skills in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). Temperature are expected to rise throughout the year and over the whole country with slightly higher increases in the south-east. The changes in precipitation are less consistent with some months projected to have an increase and others to have a reduction. Introduction The Government of Zambia was fully aware of the principles of Integrated Water Resources Management.  The need for climate change to integrated in water resources planning was recognised in the National Water Plan of 1994. The Water Resources Management Act of 2011 took this a stage further. This act sought to create a National Water Authority. Section 8 of the Act on ‘Function...

Climate Change Impact Part 5: Example – Great Lakes of Africa Summary The Great Lakes of Africa are an important source of fish. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) wished to know to what extent climate change would influence the water temperature in the lakes. A study was carried out which found that lake temperature would increase by around 1°C by the middle of the 21 st .century. Introduction FAO initiated an activity to investigate the possible effects and impacts of climate change on fish and fisheries production on the African Great Lakes; Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika and Malawi. Figure 1 Great Lakes of Africa Figure 1 Great Lakes of Africa Current climate The Joint Research Centre (JRC) at Ispra, Italy, maintains databases of unpublished satellite data including water surface temperatures on the African Great Lakes on an 8-day basis. A time series of a number of decades was required to be analysed in order to present the ...

Climate Change Impact Part 2: Example – Southern Bangladesh Summary This posting is based on a study of the impact of climate change on Southern Bangladesh. It examines current climate related problems which include storm rainfall, drought duration and sea level rise. It concludes that the main changes in climate in the region will be increases in temperature, storm rainfall, sea level and drought severity. Average rainfall will remain similar to the present. Introduction The project area is shown in the following map. It covered 13 Upazilas in southern Bangladesh. The total population of the project areas was 17.6 million. In some Upazalis the population density was more than 1000 people per square kilometre; about the average for Bangladesh. Figure  1  Map of project area The project tackled three areas of vulnerability: roads, cyclone shelters and markets. In terms of climate vulnerability, a significant factor in the project area wa...

On 16 May 2012 we posted on temperatures in the Yamal peninsula. This is one of the sites much discussed for its influence on temperature reconstructions. In the earlier post we looked at measured temperature data from two stations. This time we have looked at a group of stations in and around the peninsula as shown in the following map. The data were from the station files used by the CRU for their CRUT3 temperature series. We used the data from these station to cross-infill all of them. Two of them started before 1820 and eight others started in the 19th century. The method examined each pair of stations separately for each calendar month, calculated the correlation between them, then infilled missing data using whichever station had the best correlation and which had not itself been infilled. As examples of the infilling we give below sample charts for 5 stations near to the peninsula: Salehard, MYS Kamennyj, Berezovo, Hoseda-Hard and Ostrov-Dikson. The most interesting chart we ...

A recurring topic at ClimateAudit has been the use of tree ring data from the Yamal peninsula in Russia. Steve Mcintyre, the author of ClimateAudit, maintains that data from that area have been used selectively by researchers at the CRU to support the idea of a 'hockey stick' . At the RealClimate blog Gavin Schmidt claims that the results by the CRU were obtained after selection of samples following rigorous analysis of the data. The Yamal peninsula is at around 71N 71 E. Below I plot data from two sites near to Yamal. One, Salehard, is 200 km south of the Peninsula and the other Ostrov Dickson is 200 km to the north east. The data were downloaded from the ClimateExplorer web site. There are few missing months in the data and I replaced them by the average of same calander month for the preceding and following year except for 2011 where I used the average of the temperature for appropriate calendar months. As can be seen the observed data show no sign of a hockey stick. Both si...