Exploring and Anticipating Extreme East African Short Rains

During the 16 rainy seasons since October-November-December (OND) of 2016, the eastern Horn of Africa (eHorn) has experienced an exceptional sequence of extreme rainy seasons, with 8 dry seasons, 6 wet seasons, and just 2 normal rainy seasons (Figure 1). In 2016/17 and 2020/22  climate change-enhanced west Pacific sea surface temperatures (SST) amplified the influence of La Nina, leading to hazard two-season and five-season drought sequences that forced millions of people into starvation as crops failed and millions of livestock perished. Drought conditions during 2020-22 were exceptionally intense, persistent, extensive and hot, devastating livelihoods and producing repetitive, debilitating and cumulative shocks to herds, crops, water availability, and household incomes. More than eight million livestock died and millions of people faced the threat of starvation, and emergency humanitarian relief efforts required more than $2 billion USD. Extreme rains in March-April-May (MAM) of 2018,..., This data set draws from five widely used sources: the Climate Hazard Center Infrared Precipitation with Stations archive (CHIRPS), the Centennial Trends Gridded Rainfall archive, the NOAA Extended Reconstruction sea surface temperature data set (version 5), ERA5 Reanalysis atmospheric heating values, and seasonal SST forecasts from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME). While all of these data are publicly available, we pull together in this dataset all the salient time series supporting the basic results in our paper. All data are for October-November-December (OND)., , # Dataset - Exploring and Anticipating Extreme East African Short Rains

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmh4z](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f1vhhmh4z)

This data set contains the time series supporting the main results presented in the upcoming manuscript 'Exploring and Anticipating Extreme East African Short Rains in a Warming World with the Indo-Pacific Heating Gradient'. This deposit contains a spreadsheet with the underlying data to reproduce figures and major results.

This data set draws from five widely used sources:

* The Climate Hazard Center Infrared Precipitation with Stations archive (CHIRPS) and the Centennial Trends Gridded Rainfall archive:

Funk C., Peterson P., Landsfeld M., Pedreros D., Verdin J., Shukla S., Husak G., Rowland J., Hoell A. and Michaelsen J. (2015) The climate hazards group infrared precipitation with stations - a new environmental record for monitoring extremes, Scientific Data, 22, 150066. [http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201566](http://www.n...