File:Horn of Africa lack of Rainfall.jpg

Summary

Prolonged drought in the Horn of Africa along with political turmoil has created a dire situation in Somalia. The Horn receives the majority of its precipitation during two wet seasons: one in the fall and another in the spring. The spring rains are especially critical, as the water is needed to last throughout the brutal sub-Saharan summer. This past year has been especially dry. Both wet seasons have failed to produce the rainfalls necessary to sustain crops and livestock, leading to widespread food shortages and famine.
In many areas around the world, even the U.S., rain gauge data can be sparse. Nevertheless, accurate rainfall estimates are needed for weather models and hazard warnings, so NOAA has developed techniques to augment rainfall measurements by including infrared and microwave data from geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites. Besides aiding forecasts in the U.S., these estimate techniques have proven very useful for detecting possible famines in Africa, and the data is widely used by the U.N., the World Meteorological Organization, and USAID. Shown here are plots of the average spring wet season (April through June) rainfall since 1995, the total rainfall during the wet season this past year (April through June 2011), and how the past season compared to the long-term average. Drier than normal conditions (brown colors) can be seen in the image on the far right throughout much of Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, The Republic of Tanzania, Uganda, and the newly-formed South Sudan.

Licensing

Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.