An imminent return to drought in the western Sahel?

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, the semi-arid Sahel, the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, experienced spatially uniform drought, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. The recovery that ensued is projected to continue in the center and east, leaving the west out. We show that these two patterns-uniform variation and east-west contrast-are present in instrumental observations and in simulations with constant or time-varying external forcing. Uniform variation is amplified by 20th century external forcing, while a global warming-induced strengthening of the monsoon seeds the east-west contrast. This contrast is deepened by a mid-21st century transition to a North Atlantic cooling relative to the global tropical oceans, which affects the western Sahel most strongly because it is immediately adjacent to the North Atlantic, leading to a divergence in outcomes-between a progressively wetter central and eastern Sahel and an abruptly drier western Sahel-that is unparalleled in instrumental observations.