While there have been some Recent backs Within research and disturbing news about NOAA, there are also continuous efforts to respond to climate change. During my trips to Mozambique and Ghana, I could feel a true appreciation for knowledge and an enthusiasm to learn to calculate the risks related to climate change.
Recent events have shown incredibly high amounts of rains that They have devastated cities and countriesas well as droughts that have exacerbated the risk of forest fires. It is well known that global warming offers more extreme rain, and this is explained mainly as a result that the warmest air can contain more moisture. It is, in other words, the Clapeyron-Clausius equation That describes how the water vapor pressure is related to temperature.
An additional explanation for the extreme amounts of rain is how daily rain is distributed unequally on the surface of the earth. There are now several documents that document that daily rainfall falls to a decreasing fraction of the land surface over time, based on satellite data, reanalysis data and simulations of global climate model (Dobler et al., 2024 and references there).
Changes in the way in which rain is distributed over Africa can explain both floods and droughts, and it is important to obtain reliable information about the probability of heavy rains to be prepared for what the future climate will bring.
It is urgent to begin adaptation to climate change due to rapid global warming (for example, Press.Climate.Copernicus.eu) and Global statistics Show that temperature and rain have already become more extreme. In addition, adaptation to climate change can send an urgency message and importance for mitigation.
In Mozambique I helped organize a CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study (FPS) Workshop in Maputo Where we work on capacities development based on an open source tool for reduction of empirical statistical scale. This tool is useful for studying the consequences of climate change and providing valuable information for climatic adaptation. (Benestad et al., 2025).
A particular type of adaptation measures is connected to the weather and health that occurs in Ghana. The annual meeting of Springs project It was held near Akosombo in the Volta basin, and one of its objectives is to provide estimates of future rains to feed hydrological models to calculate water quality and model the spread of pathogens that lead to diarrhea outbreak.
This knowledge will be used for policy and intervention formulation strategies for both water management and health planning. To better understand the local situation, we inspect a pumping station, as shown below, with water treatment and water supply to the communities.
However, the water provided by the pumping stations and the water treatment plants do not always cover all the needs, and the alternative is to look for water from the vote river.
The manure and stool on the ground and in the fields extend to streams and rivers when there are heavy rains, and we need robust estimates of the frequency with which we can wait days of heavy rain to assess the future risks of such health problems.
We use a very simple formula to estimate how often we can wait days with heavy rains, and the graphics below give an annual frequency example (red) (black) (black) (black) with more than 20 mm in Maputo, Mozambique. TO Similar calculation for Tanzania It gives a good similar coincidence, and we hope to find a similar coincidence for the data of the Ghana rain rainfall once we have access to it. This calculation is only based on the annual frequency of wet day and the average precipitation of wet day (Benestad et al., 2025).
) and average precipitation of the wet day (
). It shows that the simple formula can give an approximate number of days with strong rainfall per year (here it is shown as a number of days divided by 365.25 days). Both the workshop in Maputo and the Springs project exploit this simplified and approximate estimate of heavy rains, which is a step towards extreme amounts of rain, but nevertheless it is not enough for amounts of rain in the excess of 100 mm/day.
Another important part of the Springs project is the co -production of knowledge, which implies a diversity of interdisciplinary disciplines and collaborations. The connection between the academy and the scientific community, on the one hand, and society, on the other, is becoming increasingly important. Climate change is making the news in several ways, and Ghana challenges imply both migration and flood pressure.
We also know that similar problems can be expected both in Europe and North America, and that climate change affects animal and human health.
Another thing I like to emphasize is that we have the necessary knowledge about climate change based on science and data. The earth is continually monitored through satellites, instruments in the soil and air, and the climate of the earth is reproduced through extensive simulations of models (if you cannot obtain information from US sites, there is the Copernicus climate change services; “C3S”).
We also know what is needed to stop global warming: atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane must stabilize, and forests must be protected.
References
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A. Dobler, Re Benestad, C. Lussana and O. Landgren, “CMIP6 models project a reduction precipitation area”, NPJ Climate and Atmospheric Sciencevol. 7, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41612-024-00794-Z
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Re Benestad, Km Parding and A. Dobler, “Reduction of the probability of heavy rains over the Nordic countries”, Hydrology and Earth System Sciencesvol. 29, p. 45-65, 2025. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/hes-29-45-2025
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