Climatic gradients along the windward slopes of Mount Kenya and their implication for crop risks. Part 1: climate variability

Camberlin, Pierre; Boyard-Micheau, Joseph; Philippon, Nathalie; Baron, Christian; Leclerc, Christian; Mwongera, Caroline

doi:10.1002/joc.3427

Cited by 24 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…The stations' monthly and daily rainfall records encompassed the period 1961-2006. These quality-controlled records have been the object of a recent analysis by Camberlin et al (2012). A comparison with other stations located within the same altitudinal belts on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya, but having shorter records, revealed strong correlations between the interannual rainfall variability at all these stations.…”

Section: Rainfall Datamentioning

confidence: 93%

“…The agriculture of Meru communities established along the mountain slopes is mainly rain-fed. Rainfall is bimodal with a rainy season from March to May (hereafter, long rains) and another from October to December (short rains; Camberlin et al 2009Camberlin et al , 2012.…”

Section: Context Of the Study Site And Specific Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To control the increase of rainfall amounts with altitude (Camberlin et al 2012), climatic variables were ranked into ordered categories of equal size, considering each altitudinal level separately. The resulting contingency tables displayed the counts of the farmers' declarations (e.g., drought or other events, as lines in the tables) as a function of the ordered rainfall categories (as columns in the tables).…”

Section: Independence Between Causes Mentioned By Farmers and Rainfalmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Indigenous Past Climate Knowledge as Cultural Built-in Object and Its Accuracy

Leclerc¹,

Mwongera²,

Camberlin³

et al. 2013

E&S

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ABSTRACT. In studying indigenous climate knowledge, two approaches can be envisioned. In the first, traditional knowledge is a cultural built-in object; conceived as a whole, its relevance can be assessed by referring to other cultural, economic, or technical components at work within an indigenous society. In the second, the accuracy of indigenous climate knowledge is assessed with western science knowledge used as an external reference. However, assessing the accuracy of indigenous climate knowledge remains a largely untapped area. We aim to show how accurate the culturally built indigenous climate knowledge of extreme climatic events is, and how amenable it is to fuzzy logic. A retrospective survey was carried out individually and randomly among 195 Eastern African farmers on climatic reasons for loss of on-farm crop diversity from 1961 to 2006. More than 3000 crop loss events were recorded, and reasons given by farmers were mainly related to droughts or heavy rainfall. Chisquare statistics computed by Monte Carlo simulations based on 999 replicates clearly rejected independence between indigenous knowledge of drought and heavy rainfall that occurred in the past and rainfall records. The fuzzy logic nature of indigenous climatic knowledge appears in the clear association of drought or heavy rainfall events, as perceived by farmers, with corresponding extreme rainfall values, contrasting with a fuzzy picture in the intermediate climatic situations. We discuss how the cultural built-in knowledge helps farmers in perceiving and remembering past climate variations, considering the specificity of the contexts where extreme climatic events were experienced. The integration of indigenous and scientific climate knowledge could allow development of drought monitoring that considers both climatic and contextual data.

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Section: Rainfall Datamentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Context Of the Study Site And Specific Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Independence Between Causes Mentioned By Farmers and Rainfalmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Indigenous Past Climate Knowledge as Cultural Built-in Object and Its Accuracy

Leclerc¹,

Mwongera²,

Camberlin³

et al. 2013

E&S

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“…Despite the small size of the area, the interannual variability of the seasonal rainfall amounts and ISCs are quite representative of a larger area covering most of Kenya and Northern Tanzania (Boyard-Micheau et al, 2013;Camberlin et al, 2014). Three ethno-linguistic groups, namely the Muthambi, Mwimbi, and Tharaka were investigated.…”

Section: Ethnological Fieldworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper we synthesize the main results of a multidisciplinary framework, the PICREVAT project (January 2009-June 2013), combining statistical analyses of interannual and intra-annual variability of rainfall and of crop-rainfall relationships (papers by Boyard-Micheau et al, 2013;Moron et al, 2013;Camberlin et al, 2014;Philippon et al, 2015a,b;Hernández et al, 2015) with ethnographic surveys (papers by Leclerc et al, 2013Leclerc et al, , 2014Mwongera et al, 2014;Hernández et al, 2015). All the agro-climatic and ethnographic analyses were carried out on three contrasted fields: (1) North Cameroon in the SudanoSahelian belt, mixing cotton with subsistence crops (mainly sorghum and maize); (2) Kenya and North Tanzania (Camberlin et al, 2009Philippon et al, 2015a,b) with a focus on eastern slopes of Mt Kenya, where small-scale subsistence farming is based on mixed cropping systems but maize has gradually surpassed traditional (and less drought-vulnerable) crops like sorghum and pearl millet (Leclerc et al, 2013Mwongera et al, 2014); and (3) central Pampa in Argentina, where the farming system has recently shifted from mixed crops and livestock to dominant transgenic soybean cropping system (Magrin et al, 2005;Pengue, 2005Pengue, , 2006Caviglia and Andrade, 2010;Hernandez et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethnographic context and spatial coherence of climate indicators for farming communities – A multi-regional comparative assessment

Moron

Boyard-Micheau

Camberlin

et al. 2015

Climate Risk Management

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a b s t r a c tAccurate seasonal predictions of rainfall may reduce climatic risks that farmers are usually faced with across the tropical and subtropical zones. However, although regional-scale seasonal amounts have regularly been forecasted since 1997/98, the practical use of these seasonal predictions is still limited by myriad factors. This paper synthesizes the main results of a multi-disciplinary ethnographic and climatic project (PICREVAT). Its main objective was to seek the climatic information -beyond the seasonal amounts -critical for crops, both as an actual constraint to crop yields and as identified by the current and past practices and perceptions of farmers. A second goal was to confront the relevance and significance of this climatic information with its spatial coherence, which gives an upper bound of its potential predictability. The ethnographic and climatic analyses were carried out on three very different fields: North Cameroon (mixed food crops associated with a cash crop -cotton -integrated into a national program); Eastern slopes of Mt Kenya (mixed food crops, with a recent development of maize at the expense of sorghum and pearl millet); and Central Argentina (mixed crops and livestock recently converting to monoculture of transgenic soybean, referred to as soybeanization).The ethnographic surveys, as well as yield-climate functions, emphasized the role played by various intra-seasonal characteristics of the rainy seasons beyond the seasonal rainfall amounts, in both actual yields and people's representations and/or crop management strategies. For instance, the onset of the rainy season in East Africa and North Cameroon, the season duration in the driest district of the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya, or rains at the core (August) and at the end of the rainy season in North Cameroon have been highlighted. The dynamics of farming systems (i.e. soybeanization in Central Argentina, increasing popularity of maize in East Africa, recent decline of cotton in North Cameroon) were also emphasized as active drivers; these slow changes could increase climatic vulnerability (i.e. soybean is far more sensitive to rainfall variations than wheat, maize is less droughthttp://dx.

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Climate and climatic variability of rainfall over eastern Africa

Nicholson

2017

Reviews of Geophysics

547

425

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This review examines several aspects of the climate of eastern Africa. The climatic commonality throughout the region is the frequent occurrence of drought severe enough to incapacitate the population. Because of recent droughts and evidence of disastrous, long‐term climatic change, the region has become a major focus of meteorological research. This review covers six relevant topics: climatic regionalization, seasonal cycle, intraseasonal variability, interannual variability, recent trends, and seasonal forecasting. What emerges is a markedly different view of the factors modulating rainfall, the dynamics associated with the seasons, and the character of teleconnections within the region and the interrelationships between the various rainy seasons. Some of the most important points are the following. (1) The paradigm of two rainy seasons resulting from the biannual equatorial passage of the Intertropical Convergence Zone is inadequate. (2) The “long rains” should not be treated as a single season, as character, causal factors, and teleconnections are markedly different in each month. (3) The long rains have been declining continuously in recent decades. (4) The Madden‐Julian Oscillation has emerged as a factor in interannual and intraseasonal variability, but the relative strength of Pacific and Indian Ocean anomalies plays a major role in the downward trend. (5) Factors governing the short rains are nonstationary. (6) Droughts have become longer and more intense and tend to continue across rainy seasons, and their causes are not adequately understood. (7) Atmospheric variables provide more reliable seasonal forecasts than the factors traditionally considered in forecast models, such as sea surface temperatures and El Niño–Southern Oscillation.

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Climatic gradients along the windward slopes of Mount Kenya and their implication for crop risks. Part 1: climate variability

Abstract: International audienc

Cited by 24 publications

References 46 publications

Indigenous Past Climate Knowledge as Cultural Built-in Object and Its Accuracy

Indigenous Past Climate Knowledge as Cultural Built-in Object and Its Accuracy

Ethnographic context and spatial coherence of climate indicators for farming communities – A multi-regional comparative assessment

Climate and climatic variability of rainfall over eastern Africa

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