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posted by janrinok on Saturday December 03 2016, @04:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the less-rain dept.

As little as 6,000 years ago, the vast Sahara Desert was covered in grassland that received plenty of rainfall, but shifts in the world's weather patterns abruptly transformed the vegetated region into some of the driest land on Earth. A Texas A&M university researcher is trying to uncover the clues responsible for this enormous climate transformation – and the findings could lead to better rainfall predictions worldwide.

Robert Korty, associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, along with colleague William Boos of Yale University, have had their work published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.

The two researchers have looked into precipitation patterns of the Holocene era and compared them with present-day movements of the intertropical convergence zone, a large region of intense tropical rainfall. Using computer models and other data, the researchers found links to rainfall patterns thousands of years ago.

"The framework we developed helps us understand why the heaviest tropical rain belts set up where they do," Korty explains.

"Tropical rain belts are tied to what happens elsewhere in the world through the Hadley circulation, but it won't predict changes elsewhere directly, as the chain of events is very complex. But it is a step toward that goal."


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by WalksOnDirt on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:12AM

    by WalksOnDirt (5854) on Saturday December 03 2016, @08:12AM (#436455) Journal

    The world was warmer 6000 years ago. Warmer worlds have more rainfall, and it just so happened that the extra rain that fell on the Sahara was more important than the extra evaporation. It's cooler now and it has dried up. I don't know why it hit the Sahara so hard; climate is very complicated.

    No, human caused warming probably won't have the same effect.

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