Our collaborators in the Forestry and Natural Resources at WVU (Mo Zhou and Jingjing Liang), Yaqian He, and Eungul Lee identified the potential positive feedback of vegetation change on summer monsoon rainfall in the Sahel and suggested that recently intensifying agricultural practices could play a role in re-greening the Sahel and thereby favor rainfall increase in this moisture-limited region [Lee et al., 2015 Physical Geography]. In a follow-on study, Yaqian He and Eungul Lee documented that the regional land surface forcing contribution to Sahel summer rainfall is stronger than that of the remote ocean forcing, during the recent three decades [He and Lee, 2016 Earth Interactions]. Our results of the Sahel monsoon studies indicate that the land surface processes related to vegetation change exert important roles in explaining the Sahel summer rainfall variability.

Publications

Lee, E., Y. He, M. Zhou, and J. Liang (2015), Potential Feedback of Recent Vegetation Changes on Summer Rainfall in the Sahel, Physical Geography, 36 (6), 449-470. [Link]

He, Y., and E. Lee (2016), Empirical Relationships of Sea Surface Temperature and Vegetation Activity with Summer Rainfall Variability over the Sahel, Earth Interactions, 20, 1–18. [Link]

Funding sources

WVU Senate Grant for Research and Scholarship [2013-2014].