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Projected changes in Malawi’s growing season

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Abstract

Regional climate model projections at 30-km resolution are used to predict future mid-century and late-century growing season changes over Malawi due to global warming under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 business-as-usual emissions forcing scenario. Three different methods for estimating growing season characteristics are applied and evaluated. All three methods yield reasonable growing season length, onset, and demise date estimates over Malawi given the wide range of uncertainty of the observations. The projections indicate the likelihood for a shorter growing season in the future over Malawi south of 13.5°S. At mid-century the growing season length is predicted to be 20–40 % (20–55 days) shorter over the southernmost districts and 5–20 % (5–30 days) shorter over the central districts. By late-century the length is predicted to be 25–55 % (20–70 days) shorter with significant differences extending into northern Malawi. The shorter growing season is primarily associated with an earlier demise date, as no significant change in the onset date is predicted. Analysis of the regional circulation and horizontal moisture flux transport indicates that the earlier demise is associated with an intensification of the thermal low over the Kalahari Desert to the south and west of Malawi and an expansion of the mid-tropospheric Kalahari anticyclone over southern Africa. The stronger thermal low/anticyclone enhances the moisture flux divergence over Malawi suppressing the convective activity at the end of the wet season.

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Acknowledgments

Support from USAID (Climate Change Resilient Development award #13-754-UTA) and the University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences seed grant program is gratefully acknowledged. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin provided the high performance computing and database resources. We also gratefully acknowledge the GCM modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), and the World Climate Research Program’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP5 multi-model dataset. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geological Sciences, Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station C1100, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Edward K. Vizy & Kerry H. Cook

  2. Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, P.O. Box 280, Zomba, Malawi

    James Chimphamba

  3. Department of Geology and Geography, West Virginia University, 330 Brooks Hall, 98 Beechurst Ave., Morgantown, WV, 26506, USA

    Brent McCusker

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  1. Edward K. Vizy
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Correspondence to Edward K. Vizy.

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Vizy, E.K., Cook, K.H., Chimphamba, J. et al. Projected changes in Malawi’s growing season. Clim Dyn 45, 1673–1698 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2424-x

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