Some Predicted Climatic Effects of a Simulated Sahara Lake

Abstract

Results of simulating the addition of a large body of water to the Sahara Desert using the Rand version of the Mintz-Arakawa general circulation model. The simulated lake is a relatively small perturbation to the earth's boundary condition and was chosen to test the hypothesis that an observable and statistically significant change would be produced in the local circulation. The flux and flux divergence of water vapor over North Africa was studied to determine where the water added to the atmosphere by the lake would be precipitated. A significant change in precipitation was subsequently observed over the selected area. A new statistical measure is described and used to measure the significance of the observed change.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 1974
Accession Number
AD0780652

Entities

People

  • M. Warshaw
  • R. R. Rapp

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Africa
  • Atmospheres
  • Boundaries
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Programs
  • Data Science
  • Grids
  • Information Science
  • Meteorology
  • North Africa
  • Precipitation
  • Simulations
  • Statistical Analysis
  • Statistics
  • Temperature Gradients
  • Vapors
  • Water Vapor

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Environmental Engineering
  • Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Modeling, Data Assimilation, and Flux Boundary Layers