SIMULATING DROUGHT IN SOUTHERN AFRICA USING SEA-SURFACE TEMPERATURE-VARIATIONS

Changes in atmospheric circulation that produce droughts over South Africa are briefly reviewed, as too are the links between regions of homogeneous sea surface temperature variation in the oceans around Southern Africa and their correlation with rainfall over South Africa. Thereafter sea surface temperature anomaly fields known to be linked to the occurrence of droughts are used to initialise the 4-level CSIRO general circulation climate model to simulate drought over South Africa. Model results are compared with previously developed hypotheses concerning ocean-atmosphere interactions in the region and are shown to be consistent with observations in many important respects.