Abstract
The anomalous meteorological and oceanic conditions in the tropical Atlantic basin during 1983–84 can be seen as an extreme example of a common historical pattern. Here we present time series of rainfall in subsaharan West Africa (SWA) and north-east Brazil (NEB), which show that departures in 1983–84 were severe, but not unprecedented. The associated sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly patterns included one that had previously been shown to accompany earlier years of extreme rainfall in SWA and NEB, and others that contained key elements of that pattern. The pattern concerned was recently shown to be a major mode of tropical Atlantic SST variation.
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Lamb, P., Peppler, R. & Hastenrath, S. Interannual variability in the tropical Atlantic. Nature 322, 238–240 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1038/322238a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/322238a0
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