The drought in Africa is bad.
And a warning - the pictures in this article are very disturbing. But they are unfortunately real.
Kenya's plains of the dead: Animal corpses cover the land as even the Maasai people say they have not seen a drought like it after three years without rainScientists likely know the reason for this. But science and technology can't fix it.
Here's the abstract (which is all that I can read, but maybe I'll buy it for Christmas). I did the underlining.
"One of the primary sources of predictability for seasonal hydroclimate forecasts are sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the tropical Pacific, including the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Multi-year La Niña events in particular may be both predictable at long lead times and favor drought in the bimodal rainfall regions of East Africa. However, SST patterns in the tropical Pacific and adjacent ocean basins often differ substantially between first- and second-year La Niñas, which can change how these events affect regional climate. Here, we demonstrate that multi-year La Niña events favor drought in the Horn of Africa in three consecutive seasons (OND-MAM-OND). But they do not tend to increase the probability of a fourth season of drought owing to the sea surface temperatures and associated atmospheric teleconnections in the MAM long rains season following second-year La Niña events. First-year La Niñas tend to have both greater subsidence over the Horn of Africa, associated with warmer waters in the West Pacific that enhance the Walker Circulation, and greater cross-continental moisture transport, associated with a warm Tropical Atlantic, as compared to second-year La Niñas. Both the increased subsidence and enhanced cross-continental moisture transport favors drought in the Horn of Africa. Our results provide physical understanding of the sources and limitations of predictability for using multi-year La Niña forecasts to predict drought in the Horn of Africa."
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