Earthsky Interviews
Private: Rain patterns predict African health.
June 30, 2005 - Earth
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.
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.
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.
Our thanks today to “NASA”:http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html?skipIntro=1:_ explore, discover, understand. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
Read about the international “AMMA”:http://amma.mediasfrance.org/international/index project – African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses.
Read about the “U.S. component of AMMA”:http://www.joss.ucar.edu/amma/.
Our thanks to:
Chris Thorncroft
Associate Professor
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
State University of New York (SUNY), Albany
Albany, New York