CLIVAR AFRICA Implementation Plan

Africa is a vast continent straddling the equator with roughly equal landmasses in each hemisphere. It forms one of the three major tropical land areas (along with South America and Indonesia-Borneo or the so-called ‘maritime continent’) and is surrounded by two of the three tropical oceanic basins. Africa’s unique geographical position leads to an equally substantial role in determining the characteristics of the general circulation of the atmosphere both regionally and globally. Africa is the third largest heat source for the atmosphere (Hartman, 1994) and potentially the second largest at particular times of the annual cycle. The heat source and associated regional circulations exhibit substantial variability on intraseasonal to decadal time-scales. There are three major questions that CLIVAR-Africa must address. The first is: