AMMA-UK: African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses

AMMA-UK: NERC Consortium Project

Project Summary

Detailed project description (word format).

Africa has experienced demonstrable climatic changes in the past 3 decades, leading to severe effects on water resources, agriculture and health. However, our predictive methods for this region remain unreliable: 'The diversity of African climates, high rainfall variability, and a very sparse observational network make predictions of future climate change very difficult at the subregional and local level'.¹

Tropical Africa is a primary global source for biogenic precursors of key greenhouse forcing agents, yet there have never been detailed observations of the tropospheric composition in this region.

The convective processes controlling tropical African climate and atmospheric composition are poorly observed and predicted worldwide: Africa is a natural laboratory for tropical continental climate.

An international programme, AMMA (African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses), has been instigated with the aim of obtaining and using high quality interdisciplinary observations to make a step-change in our understanding of the West African Monsoon (WAM) system. This is an opportunity to address problems in our understanding of the African environment and its global interactions which is unlikely to be repeated for many decades to come. As part of the international AMMA programme we propose to undertake a substantial effort, to measure and explain the physical and chemical processes which determine the local climate and its global impacts. At the heart of AMMA-UK is the study of the interaction of the land surface with the atmosphere over the highly variable land surface types and soil moisture patterns of West Africa. This land-atmosphere interaction is critical to the monsoon state, the continental water and energy cycles and the global atmospheric composition. In order to observe these processes, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary, linking long-term measurements of the seasonal climatic changes in the land surface and atmosphere with short term, intensive measurements of the coupled system. A suite of atmospheric tracers will be used to explain the dynamical properties of the system, and accurate modelling of the dynamics will be used to explain the emission and export of trace gases and particles.

We have two over-arching aims:

To improve our scientific understanding of the WAM and its interaction with the physical, chemical and biological environment regionally and globally.
To ensure that this multidisciplinary research addresses the needs of prediction and decision making.

Reference:
1. Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability - Contribution of Working Group II to the IPCC Third Assessment Report 2001.

Last updated 6 October 2004