South Africa has one of the largest industrialized economies in Africa. Emissions of air pollutants are particularly high in the Johannesburg-Pretoria metropolitan area, the Mpumalanga Highveld and the Vaal Triangle, resulting in local air pollution. This study presents and evaluates a setup for conducting modeling experiments over southern Africa with the Weather Research and Forecasting model including chemistry and aerosols (WRF-Chem), and analyzes the contribution of anthropogenic emissions to the total black carbon (BC) concentrations from September to December 2010.

An observational analysis of the catastrophic rainstorm during 4–6 September 2014 over Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) presented in this study shows that the event was unprecedented in terms of the 24, 48 and 72 h accumulated rainfall. The 24 h accumulated rainfall exceeded the previously determined one-day severe rainstorm limits of 20 cm for a number of stations on 5 and 6 September 2014.

Original Source

Stabilizing smallholder crop yields under changing climatic conditions in subSaharan Africa will require adaptation strategies focused on soil and water management. Impact studies of climate change on crop yields often ignore the potential of adaptation strategies such as rainwater harvesting (RWH). While RWH is bringing benefits to agricultural systems today, it is still unclear which regions could increasingly benefit from RWH under changing climatic conditions.

A study based on farm household survey was conducted in mid-hills of Himachal Pradesh to gain insights on people s perceptions and adaptations to climate change and variability. Results of the study indicated that 88.9 % of people perceived rise in temperature of the region while 88.4 % perceived a decreasing trend in amount of rainfall. People s perceptions for both maximum temperature and rainfall were in accordance with results of linear regression analysis of weather data of the period from 1995- 2011 collected from meteorological station in the region.

Given the increasing impacts of flooding in Jakarta, methods for assessing current and future flood risk are required. In this paper, we use the Damagescanner-Jakarta risk model to project changes in future river flood risk under scenarios of climate change, land subsidence, and land use change. We estimate current flood risk at USD 143 million p.a. Combining all future scenarios, we simulate a median increase in risk of +263 % by 2030. The single driver with the largest contribution to that increase is land subsidence (+173 %).

Currently, little is known on how volcanic eruptions impact large-scale climate phenomena such as paleo-ITCZ position or South American summer monsoon behavior. In this paper, an analysis of observations and model simulations is employed to assess the influence of large volcanic eruptions on the climate of South America. This problem is considered both for historically recent volcanic episodes, for which more comprehensive global observations exist, as well as reconstructed volcanic events for the period 850 C.E.

The devastating flood episode (16–17 June 2013) at Kedarnath (Uttrakhand, India), caused a huge loss of lives and loss of physical/material wealth. To understand this catastrophic event, rainfall/convective data and associated climate meteorological parameters are investigated. A low-pressure zone with very high cloud cover (60–90 %) and relative humidity (70–100 %), associated with low (< 4 m s−1) wind velocity, are observed over the Kedarnath region during 15–17 June.

Spatially extensive and persistent drought episodes have repeatedly influenced human history, including the 'Strange Parallels' drought event in monsoon Asia during the mid-18th century. Here we explore the dynamics of sustained monsoon failure using observed and tree-ring reconstructed drought patterns and a 1300-year pre-industrial community earth system model control run. Both modern observational and climate model drought patterns during years with extremely weakened South Asian monsoon resemble those reconstructed for the Strange Parallels drought.

Climate strongly influences global wildfire activity, and recent wildfire surges may signal fire weather-induced pyrogeographic shifts. Here we use three daily global climate data sets and three fire danger indices to develop a simple annual metric of fire weather season length, and map spatio-temporal trends from 1979 to 2013. We show that fire weather seasons have lengthened across 29.6 million km2 (25.3%) of the Earth’s vegetated surface, resulting in an 18.7% increase in global mean fire weather season length.