Draft:2024 Sahara and Sahel floods

2024 Sahara and Sahel floods are unusual, rare (not annual) floods in the Sahara Desert and adjacent Sahel transitional region, particularly in late summer to autumn. This contrasts with earlier considered normal in the year annual rains. This event is expected to kill untold thousands of people across the entire region and months long timeframe. It is considered by climatologists to have a strong connection with climate change.

Understand

Flooding in Sahara is considered a rare, once or twice a decade event. This is typically due to a northward shift in ITCZ from coastal West Africa northward towards the Sahel. Every year, there are seasonal Sahel rains but this phenomenon is different. There is an outbreak of scattered rain whose pattern changes by the hour, reminiscent of dancing North American monsoon patterns in the Great Basin. Such rains typically reach deep into Sahara desert, and there is persistent (months long) patterns that can extend clear across the north-south of the Sahara desert, especially in Morocco and Algeria, even Tunisia and Libya, (Egypt is spared of these rain events), but main area seems to extend to Mali, Chad, Niger, Ethiopia, Sudan and even across to Red Sea side of Saudi Arabia. Since the region is not used to rains, the arroyos (transient creeks and rivers that spring out of nowhere) quick develop along with ensuing chaos. These events coincide with Mid-August annual transition (if its blowing, NOAA claims this Saharan Air Layer transition) from Sahara dust blowing across the Atlantic to North America, to upturn and blow towards Europe instead. A shift in region wide wind patterns, coupled with ITCZ shift, can bring out the Sahara greening phenomenon.

Reports

Media coverage on this topic is not done in a holistic way, its coming in bits and pieces and is being failed to be understood as part of a large region wide event driven by ITCZ shift. Each nation and media outlet reports their events as if they are individual unconnected events, such as in Morocco in early September. However, the events since August that have broken out regionwide from Mali and Niger, Chad, northern Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, and even bizarre unseasonable flash flooding in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, are due to this vast region-wide phenomenon. Notably, a spectacular bolt of lightning hit Masjid-al-Haram, right at Mecca Clock Tower spire.