Читать книгу Congo Basin Hydrology, Climate, and Biogeochemistry - Группа авторов - Страница 19

How has research in the Congo or in sub‐Saharan Africa changed over your career and what do you think will be an exciting new research opportunity?

The dearth of studies of the Congo Basin, as mentioned earlier, clearly applies to meteorology. Until recently this region was probably the world's least understood in terms of the physical processes governing meteorology and climate. There are several possible explanations for that. For one, in contrast to other areas of Africa, there was relatively little interest in the storm systems affecting the region. This may have been because the rainfall was quite localized, leading to the assumption that rainfall was linked to local thunderstorms and not to large‐scale meteorological processes. In fact, that was the general assumption concerning tropical rainfall. However, by the 1960s and 1970s, large‐scale systems were being recognized in West and Southern Africa, leading to extensive meteorological study. In contrast, meteorological interest in the Congo was historically linked to agriculture and the rubber plantations. Consequently, extensive climatological data on rainfall, evapotranspiration, and related parameters were gathered and published in the Bultot atlas (e.g., Bultot, 1971), but storm systems were not considered.

An additional reason for the lack of meteorological interest may have been the relatively stable rainfall regime from year to year. This is in contrast to conditions in the expansive semi‐arid regions of Africa, where meteorological literature was published on causes of droughts and interannual variability.

Meteorological interest in the Congo exploded with the launch of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) meteorological satellite in 1997. Data from TRMM showed that the Congo Basin was the site of the world's most intense thunderstorms. Later satellites showed it to be a lightning hot spot as well. At the same time the satellite products demonstrated the importance of large‐scale systems, mesoscale convective complexes, in bringing rainfall to the Congo and these are linked to large‐scale meteorology.

Unfortunately, at the time the interest in the meteorology of the Congo grew, the in‐situ data sets became scarce. For example, while hundreds of rainfall stations existed through the 1960s, by the 1990s only a handful were operative. This is a serious limitation on meteorological studies in the region because most satellite rainfall products are adjusted with gauge data. Where gauge data are scarce, such as in the central Congo Basin, satellite rainfall estimates of year‐to‐year rainfall variability are not reliable and there is tremendous diversity between the various satellite rainfall data sets for the region (Nicholson et al., 2019). Therefore, the expansion of ground‐based measurements in the region is of critical importance.