Rain patterns predict African health.
DB: This is Earth and Sky. Life in West Africa is intimately tied to the fall of rain.
JB: Less rainfall can mean less food and drinking water and – as recent studies have shown – more disease. Chris Thorncroft is a meteorologist at the State University of New York at Albany. He’s heading an international team on a three-year project to study African weather.
DB: They’ll use weather balloons, storm-chasing airplanes, ships, ground-based weather equipment, radar towers and satellites. Thorncroft hopes the work will lead to better forecasts of rain in West Africa, which in turn will help farmers.
Chris Thorncroft: If you can give some kind of warning ahead of time, there are practices that can take place to limit the impact . . . You can change perhaps the plant that you sow or the time that you seed crops depending on if the rains come late or don’t come at all.
JB: The research could also help reduce the spread of a disease relatively common in West Africa, meningitis.
Chris Thorncroft: If you have more dust in the atmosphere in the springtime, you tend to have more meningitis outbreaks. . . . The dust irritates the throat, the back of the throat, and allows infections . . . to develop . . . So if you can predict that it’s going to be more dusty or less dusty, . . . people can react to these forecasts by starting inoculation programs early or not.
_DB: Our thanks today to NASA explore, discover, understand. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
Read about the international AMMA project – African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses.
Read about the U.S. component of AMMA.
Our thanks to:
Chris Thorncroft
Associate Professor
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
State University of New York (SUNY), Albany
Albany, New York
Additional Teacher Resources
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