Africa's climate helping decision-makers make sense of climate information: Burning questions - East African climate variability and change

Climate change is expected to impact east Africa in the coming decades, with an overall warming trend, but much is still uncertain. Climate researchers working in this field aim to quantify, understand and reduce this uncertainty. On a five to 40 year timescale, climate projections are uncertain because the models used to predict the expected response from greenhouse gas emissions cannot capture all the relevant processes sufficiently well. In addition, many of the standard climate models do not fully consider all regional factors causing local climate change. There are therefore several ‘burning questions’ that scientists hope to address.