Purpose of this piece In this short companion blog, a link is provided to an article in The Conversation, in which Sabina and I give a short, broad overview of our current understanding of storms affecting Cape Town and surrounding areas and how they may be affected by climate change. In this blog, we provide… Read more »
By Sabina Abba Omar & Stefaan Conradie A major cut-off low event is currently wrecking havoc across large parts of South Africa, most notably around Kariega. This follows another severe cut-off low storm that hit the Western Cape between 6 and 9 April 2024 after a series of destructive wind and rain storms between June… Read more »
In early April, we posted a preliminary assessment of the remarkable series of rainfall events that affected the south-western Cape region from mid-February to late March. That turned out to be just the start of an extraordinarily long and intense rainfall season for the Winter Rainfall Zone. Arguably the most severe storm of the season… Read more »
Summary An initial look at preliminary March 2023 rainfall data for Table Mountain suggests it was the wettest March in the instrumental record of the “Mountain in the Sea”, going back as far as 1893! This appears to have been mostly the result of four cut-off low systems forming along the west coast during the… Read more »
The Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG), based at the University of Cape Town, will be running its annual course on Navigating Climate Risk (formerly Winter School) This in-person, one-week (5 to 9 September 2022) intensive course has been developed specifically for participants from developing countries and aims to take participants through the full spectrum of climate… Read more »
The April 2021 fire will be difficult to forget any time soon. One year later, what have we learnt about this fire and the risk of another big one?
The term adaptation has become progressively common in the climate change literature as a result of the continuing effects of a changing climate. Similarly, mitigation definitions and strategies have been well documented over the last decade as the need to address the issue of climate change becomes more and more important. And indeed, mitigating… Read more »
Politicians the world over are coming to realise that climate change is an imminent problem facing humanity. These challenges bring together concerns for the relationship of humans to nature, the responsibility of the richer nations to the poorer, the effect of local activities on global conditions and the responsibility of current generations to future ones…. Read more »
Earth’s climate is well known to be dynamic by scientists since centuries ago. Historically the earth’s climate has been rising and falling irregularly between warm periods (glacial state) and cold periods (interglacial state). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) global climate change models projections shows that from late 1970s the time series of global… Read more »