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The analysis of over 20,000 species of tetrapods and vascular plants in different countries, suggests that melting of Greenland’s ice sheets would lead to a faster collapse of global biodiversity.

Study region: Data-scarce basins located in West Africa and northern Central Africa. Study focus: Multiple studies have shown that global gridded precipitation datasets could provide an alternative to the lack of observed data in Sub-Saharan Africa. This work evaluated 15 precipitation datasets based on satellite rainfall (ARC v.2, CHIRP v.2, CHIRPS v.2, PERSIANN-CDR, MSWEP v2.2 and TAMSAT v3), reanalysis (ERA5, JRA-55 Adj, MERRA-2 PRECTOT, MERRA-2 PRECTOTCORR, WFDEI-CRU and WFDEI-GPCC) and ground measurements (CPC v.1, CRU TS v.4.00 and GPCC v.7), as well as a regional estimation method, based on spatial proximity, for the parameters of a simple monthly water balance model, GR2M. The regional simulations of the GR2M model were evaluated based on a Kling-Gupta Efficiency score in a split-sample spatiotemporal validation scheme. New hydrological insights for the region: The results show that among all the precipitation products, CHIRPS is the most effective for hydrological modeling in West and Central Africa at a monthly timestep. Also, among the top five products are WFDEI-CRU, CRU, WFDEI-GPCC and GPCC. Overall, regional hydrological modeling is more effective for basins smaller than 80,000 km2. The method of regionalization by spatial proximity causes an overall drop in the ability of the various precipitation products to reproduce discharge, most notably with WFDEI-GPCC and GPCC. CHIRPS remains the best product in terms of KGE2 values in regionalization.

This paper describes the extension of the previously CMIP5 based high-resolution climate projections with additional ones based on the more recent climate projections from the CMIP6 experiment. The downscaling method and data processing are the same but the reference dataset is now the ERA5-Land reanalysis (compared to ERA5 previously) allowing to increase the resolution of the new downscaled projections from 0.25° x 0.25° to 0.1°x 0.1°. The extension comprises 5 climate models and includes 2 surface variables at daily resolution: air temperature and precipitation. Three greenhouse gas emissions scenarios are available: Shared Socioeconomic Pathways with mitigation policy (SSP1-2.6), an intermediate one (SSP2-4.5), and one without mitigation (SSP5-8.5).

Release of freshwater into the oceans as a result of ice sheet melting could impact the distribution of climate-sensitive diseases. Here, the authors show that a rapid ice sheet melting in Greenland could cause an emergence of malaria in Southern Africa whilst transmission risks in West Africa may decline.

Julián Velasco et al. use climate model simulations to show how the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and unabated global warming under the RCP 8.5 scenario affect the global distribution of 2509 amphibian species. These results show severe and synergistic impacts of global warming, with particularly strong effects shown in the Neotropical, Nearctic and Palearctic regions.

Replacement of local crops with alternative varieties adapted to future conditions may improve food security under climate change. Here the authors apply landscape genomics and ensemble climate modelling to pearl millet in West Africa, supporting the potential of transfrontier assisted seed exchange.

A high-resolution climate projections dataset is obtained by statistically downscaling climate projections from the CMIP5 experiment using the ERA5 reanalysis from the Copernicus Climate Change Service. This global dataset has a spatial resolution of 0.25°x 0.25°, comprises 21 climate models and includes 5 surface daily variables at monthly resolution: air temperature (mean, minimum, and maximum), precipitation, and mean near-surface wind speed. Two greenhouse gas emissions scenarios are available: one with mitigation policy (RCP4.5) and one without mitigation (RCP8.5). The downscaling method is a Quantile Mapping method (QM) called the Cumulative Distribution Function transform (CDF-t) method that was first used for wind values and is now referenced in dozens of peer-reviewed publications. The data processing includes quality control of metadata according to the climate modeling community standards and value checking for outlier detection.

This article describes extreme indices maps (Data Cube, raster X Time) for different scenarios with a more important contribution to the sea level rise from Greenland and/or Antarctica during the 21st century under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 emission scenario. The indices are produced annually and globally with a resolution of 0.5° × 0.5° from 1951 to 2099. The data were generated by simulating daily maximum and minimum temperature and precipitation from the IPSL-CM5A-LR model from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). These climatic data are unbiased and downscaled to the 0.5°x0.5 scale with the Cumulative Distribution Function transform (CDFt) and EWEMBI dataset compiled to support the bias correction of climate input data for ISIMIP. Finally, each extreme indice is computed on the unbiased data on each grid cell on all continents. Keywords: Ice sheet contribution, Climate change, Extreme events, Temperature, Precipitation, Global climate model