Heavy rain and floods in East Africa that started in October have killed at least 300 people and displaced millions more. East Africa has an annual rainy season in fall, but this year’s disastrous rainfall is about double what it would have been without human-caused climate change, according to research made public on Thursday. A natural climate cycle called the Indian Ocean Dipole has also contributed to heavier rain than usual, but this phenomenon alone does not account for the extreme amount. Multiple individual rainstorms over the past two months have caused widespread flash flooding and overflowing rivers. “The influence of climate change on rainfall can be quite big,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a founder of World Weather Attribution, the group behind these findings, in an interview.

Source: The North Africa Journal December 07, 2023 13:37 UTC