Generation of African Easterly Wave Disturbances: Relationship to the African Easterly Jet

Intense convective systems in West Africa and their relationship to the African easterly jet

Ensemble-based Sensitivity Analysis applied to African Easterly Waves

An ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) coupled to the Advanced Research version of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used to generate ensemble analyes and forecasts of a strong African Easterly Wave (AEW) during the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis field campaign. Ensemble sensitivity analysis is then used to evaluate the impact of initial condition errors on AEW amplitude...

Projected changes in African easterly wave intensity and track in response to greenhouse forcing.

Synoptic-scale African easterly waves (AEWs) impact weather throughout the greater Atlantic basin. Over the African continent, AEWs are instrumental in initiating and organizing precipitation in the drought-vulnerable Sahel region. AEWs also serve as the precursors to the most intense Atlantic hurricanes, and contribute to the global transport of Saharan dust. Given the relevance of AEWs for th...

Observational evidence of African desert dust intensification of easterly waves

[1] This paper presents indirect observational evidence that desert dust can modulate the amplitude of easterly waves in the Atlantic Ocean. Twenty two years of NCEP/ NCAR reanalysis and dust from a global transport model are used to characterize the evolution of enhanced easterly waves. Lag composites of analysis increments (analysis minus first–guess) of geopotential height (700–hPa) anomalie...

Intermittent African Easterly Wave Activity in a Dry Atmospheric Model: Influence of the Extratropics

A dynamical model is constructed of the northern summertime global circulation, maintained by empirically derived forcing, based on the same dynamical code that has recently been used to study African easterly waves (AEWs) as convectively triggered perturbations (Thorncroft et al.; Leroux and Hall). In the configuration used here, the model faithfully simulates the observed mean distributions o...