All Climate Events

Friday, May 24, 2019. 11:00AM. Interactions between vegetation, dust, and climate in North Africa assessed from observation and modeling. Yan Yu, University of California, Los Angeles. Sponsored by NOAA GFDL. More information here.

North Africa is characterized by pronounced ecological and moisture gradients. The land surface varies remarkably from the tropical Congo rain forest, to steppe vegetation across the Horn of Africa, to savanna and croplands in the Sahel, to the Sahara Desert, therefore facilitating comprehensive investigations of vegetation-dust-climate interactions. The current understanding of land surface feedbacks has largely come from running and analyzing coupled vegetation-climate model simulations that have several key limitations. Observational studies are critically needed for testing these model-based findings, but require a powerful statistical tool for extracting the observed land surface feedbacks. In this talk, I will first introduce a recently developed multivariate statistical method, the Stepwise Generalized Equilibrium Feedback Assessment (SGEFA), that is designed for extracting the role of terrestrial forcings on the regional climate. Second, I will present our recent examinations of the observed impacts of vegetation and soil moisture anomalies on the regional climate of North Africa through the application of SGEFA to an array of observational, reanalysis, and remote sensing data products.