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The Changing Climate of Africa Part IV: Its Effects

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African Ecology

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Abstract

Lamb (1966) showed that rainfall dropped sharply around the years 1890–1910 in tropical and subtropical latitudes throughout the world, recovering, or beginning to recover, from 1940 to 1950 after having been at a minimum in the intervening decades. Similar trends were shown in many places near to the equator. The years 1880–1895 were very wet in Africa heralding the decrease which started about the 1890s. Only since 1961 have rainfall levels been similar to the end of nineteenth century levels, and the year 2007 witnessed some of the heaviest rainfall known from east to west in Africa north of the equator, with extensive flooding in Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, and Uganda, with even worse in 2010 extending to southern Africa also.

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Spinage, C.A. (2012). The Changing Climate of Africa Part IV: Its Effects. In: African Ecology. Springer Geography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22872-8_5

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