Peter Uhe, Sjoukje Philip, Sarah Kew, Kasturi Shah, Joyce Kimutai, Friederike Otto, Geert Jan Van Oldenborgh, Roop Singh, Julie Arrighi, Heidi Cullen

World Weather Attribution

Published date March 23, 2017

Kenya Drought, 2016

  • Finds that the dominant influence on the 2016 drought in Kenya is due to current SST patterns (for example, La Niña)
  • Temperature trends indicate that this drought is hotter than it would have been without climate change
  • Identifies no detectable trend in rainfall, but the team cannot exclude small changes in the risk of poor rains linked to climate change
  • States that all methods apart from EC-Earth in SE Kenya show either no trend or a decrease in likelihood of the drought
  • The station results indicate that the 2010-11 drought was worse than the current drought in Lamu and comparable to the current drought in Marsabit