Читать книгу Congo Basin Hydrology, Climate, and Biogeochemistry - Группа авторов - Страница 35

The Congo Basin (Figure 3.1) is the location of the world’s second‐largest expanse of rainforest. The region has much in common climatologically and ecologically with the Amazon rainforest. However, there are some hydrologic peculiarities that have not been adequately explained. One of these is the relatively low amount of annual rainfall in the region compared to the Amazon. Several papers have suggested explanations, including lower precipitable water content over the Congo (Jackson et al., 2009; McCollum et al., 2000) and low‐level subsidence (Dezfuli & Nicholson, 2013; Nicholson & Dezfuli, 2013).

This paper does not attempt to solve the controversy. Rather, it intends to use both a literature review and several new analyses to increase our understanding of the rainfall and convective regime over equatorial Africa, and the Congo Basin in particular. Secondarily, it provides a very rudimentary comparison of some of the most basic aspects of the hydrological regime in these two ecologically important regions, the Congo Basin and the Amazon.

The paper commences with a detailed overview of the meteorological background (Section 3.2) and the data utilized in this study (Section 3.3). The mean conditions of rainfall are described in Section 3.4. Interannual variability of rainfall is examined in Section 3.5 and the nature of the convective regime prevailing in the Congo Basin in Section 3.6. The comparison with the Amazon is presented in Section 3.7. Section 3.8 summarizes the rainfall and convective regime and suggests pressing questions about the meteorology of the region.

Figure 3.1 Depiction of topography over the Congo Basin and surrounding regions. Solid line approximates the boundary of the Congo River drainage basin. Dashed line approximates the extent of tropical rainforest.