Rain In The Sahara Could Mean More Hurricanes

New research from the University of Illinois Chicago suggests the Sahara Desert, long defined by relentless heat and extreme dryness, could receive up to 75% more rainfall by the end of the century.

It’s a dramatic shift that could ripple far beyond northern Africa, reshaping ecosystems, threatening vulnerable communities and even supercharging the Atlantic hurricane season.

Weather.com digital meteorologist Caitlin Kaiser says the findings caught her off guard. “When I first read this new research, it was honestly a little bit jarring because for as long as all of us have been alive, the Sahara Desert has been one of the driest places on Earth,” she said.

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But as global temperatures rise, so does the atmosphere’s capacity to hold moisture, a simple physical relationship with enormous consequences.

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“That means there will be heavier rainfall in some areas," Kaiser explained, adding, “as we see these atmospheric circulation patterns begin to shift around, that means some areas that were drier before will become wetter and some areas that were wetter before actually become drier.”

That interconnectedness, she says, is one of the core truths of weather. “You change one thing and you see the dominoes kind of fall into place.”

One of the biggest dominoes? Dust, specifically, how much of it the Sahara sends into the atmosphere.

Saharan dust plumes often drift across the Atlantic each summer, suppressing tropical storm and hurricane formation. Kaiser says losing that natural brake could have major consequences, calling it "the most alarming projection that could come out of this study."

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A wetter Sahara means wetter sand, and wetter sand is harder to loft into the air. Without those dust plumes, storms could flourish.

“Normally as a meteorologist I can take that kind of breath of air when the dust plume comes off the Sahara Desert because that means the storms are going to be suppressed,” Kaiser said. “If we don't really have that in the future, I can't even imagine how active these seasons are going to look and how many more devastating impacts we’ll see.”

That shift could open the door to stronger, more frequent and more landfalling hurricanes, Kaiser warned.

Closer to home, the Sahara itself would face unfamiliar hazards.

"Obviously flooding is going to be a major concern, especially for a place that really sees barely any rainfall,” she said.

Even small increases could reshape landscapes and communities. “When you think about an area that is this dry, even a little bit can cause a lot of changes and a lot of issues.”

Those changes may extend to vegetation, but scientists still don’t know how far that greening could go. “Whether we're going to see just a little bit more vegetation in the Sahara or more of a widespread greening is still widely up for debate," Kaiser noted.

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More rain may sound like good news, but the continent’s varied climate systems mean the impacts won’t be evenly distributed. “That rain is moving (north) away from the more southwestern and southern parts of Africa, making them drier,” Kaiser said. That could worsen extreme weather in the region and strain already fragile food systems. “We're going to see prolonged droughts, we're going to see food shortages.”

Many African communities lack the infrastructure to handle these rapid shifts. “We’re looking at the possibility of a lot of different problems for a continent that doesn't have as much infrastructure as, say, North America,” Kaiser said. Combined with an extreme weather ripple-effect around the globe, the risks add up quickly.

In the end, a wetter Sahara is about more than a greening desert. It’s about how one change in a warming world could send shockwaves across continents and oceans. As Kaiser puts it, that’s the essence of weather: everything is connected, and everything reacts when the balance shifts.