The Greening and Wetting of the Sahel Have Leveled off since about 1999 in Relation to SST

Abstract

The Sahel, a semi-arid climatic zone with highly seasonal and erratic rainfall, experienced severe droughts in the 1970s and 1980s. Based on remote sensing vegetation indices since early 1980, a clear greening trend is found, which can be attributed to the recovery of contemporaneous precipitation. Here, we present an analysis using long-term leaf area index (LAI), precipitation, and sea surface temperature (SST) records to investigate their trends and relationships. LAI and precipitation show a significant positive trend between 1982 and 2016, at 1.72 × 10 −3 yr −1 (p −1 (p − 3 yr −1 to − 0.27 × 10 −3 yr −1, and 9.72 mm yr −1 to 2.17 mm yr −1, respectively. These declines in trends are further investigated using an SST index, which is composed of the SSTs of the Mediterranean Sea, the subtropical North Atlantic, and the global tropical oceans. Causality analysis based on information flow theory affirms this precipitation stabilization between 2003 and 2014. Our results highlight that both the greening and the wetting of the Sahel have been leveled off, a feature that was previously hidden in the apparent long-lasting greening and wetting records since the extreme low values in the 1980s.

Keywords

• Sahel
• precipitation
• vegetation
• sea surface temperature
• greening
• wetting