title: Hazardous thunderstorm intensification over Lake Victoria.
abstract: Weather extremes have harmful impacts on communities around Lake Victoria, where thousands of fishermen die every year because of intense night-time thunderstorms. Yet how these thunderstorms will evolve in a future warmer climate is still unknown. Here we show that Lake Victoria is projected to be a hotspot of future extreme precipitation intensification by using new satellite-based observations, a high-resolution climate projection for the African Great Lakes and coarser-scale ensemble projections. Land precipitation on the previous day exerts a control on night-time occurrence of extremes on the lake by enhancing atmospheric convergence (74%) and moisture availability (26%). The future increase in extremes over Lake Victoria is about twice as large relative to surrounding land under a high-emission scenario, as only over-lake moisture advection is high enough to sustain Clausius-Clapeyron scaling. Our results highlight a major hazard associated with climate change over East Africa and underline the need for high-resolution projections to assess local climate change.
authors.affiliation: KU Leuven, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Leuven, Belgium.|ETH Zurich, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Universitaetsstrasse 16, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Wim
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Thiery
authors.affiliation: ETH Zurich, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Universitaetsstrasse 16, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Edouard L
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: Davin
authors.affiliation: ETH Zurich, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Universitaetsstrasse 16, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Sonia I
authors.initials: SI
authors.lastname: Seneviratne
authors.affiliation: NASA Langley Research Center, Science Directorate, 21 Langley Boulevard, Hampton, Virginia 23681, USA.
authors.forename: Kristopher
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Bedka
authors.affiliation: KU Leuven, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Leuven, Belgium.|Delft University of Technology, Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Stevinweg 1, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Stef
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1622-0177
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lhermitte
authors.affiliation: KU Leuven, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Celestijnenlaan 200E, 3001 Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Nicole P M
authors.initials: NP
authors.lastname: van Lipzig