Upper Campus,  “There are no restrictions and limitations when it comes to who needs water, it affects everyone. Its outputs used here are produced using the distributed computing framework of climateprediction.net system (Guillod et al., 2017). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 91: 1357–1363. Ian Neilson, JP Smith and Priya Reddy respond to readers’ questions… The City has started drilling operations for groundwater from the Cape Flats aquifer in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town. Capetonians queue up at local springs during the height of water restrictions in the city, when everything was being done to avoid the prospect of Day Zero when the taps would ultimately run dry. Very little of Cape Town’s water is sourced from in the city itself. Facebook. (2012) An overview of CMIP5 and the experiment 962 design. WhatsApp. Cape Town Drought: City Answers Your Questions. “Drier winters result from weaker approaching cold fronts, cold fronts steered further south than average, a reduced number of fronts, or all of these factors. Living with drought in South Africa: lessons learnt from the recent El Niño drought period. El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) appears to be an important driver of drought severity in the Western Cape, because most of the severe droughts occurred in El Niño years. How severe is Cape Town’s “Day Zero” drought? Science Faculty Other Mediterranean climate-type regions such as California, Chile and southern Australia have experienced similar rainfall and water shortage challenges, along with many of South Africa’s summer rainfall regions. Manuscript was submitted June 2018 to the Environmental Research Letters, an open access journal. Cape Town may be the first global city to run out of water. The version used is EC-Earth 2.3, which is based on the ECMWF seasonal forecasting model system 3. “Day Zero”, when the city will transition from the current preservation measures (50 litres/day) to disaster restrictions, will begin when dam levels hit 13.5 per cent of capacity (latest forecast: 15 July). “Although the CMIP5 [Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5] climate models have difficulty in representing the onset of the winter rains in April in the current climate, there seems to be a clear signal of reduced winter rainfall in future, particularly in May and June.”. doi: 10.1007/s12132-016-9296-6, Mitchell, D., AchutaRao, K., Allen, M., Bethke, I., Beyerle, U., Ciavarella, A., Forster, P. M., Fuglestvedt, J., Gillett, N., Haustein, K., Ingram, W., Iversen, T., Kharin, V., Klingaman, N., Massey, N., Fischer, E., Schleussner, C.-F., Scinocca, J., Seland, Ø., Shiogama, H., Shuckburgh, E., Sparrow, S., Stone, D., Uhe, P., Wallom, D., Wehner, M., and Zaaboul, R. (2017) Half a degree additional warming, prognosis and projected impacts (HAPPI): background and experimental design. Parodi, T. Schmith, F. Selten, T. Storelvmo, A. Sterl, H. Tapamo, M. Vancoppenolle, P. Viterbo, and U. Willén. She explained that this season was associated with a weaker subtropical jet (a belt of strong upper-level westerly winds) during 2015–2017, and less moisture being transported towards the South Western Cape from the South Atlantic. January 13th, 2021. The drought also threatens to slow South Africa’s economic rebound which has been fueled by a surge in agricultural production. The overall results are in good agreement with respect to the sign and significance of the change in probability towards an increased risk of such an event with anthropogenic forcing. Likelihood of Cape Town water crisis tripled by climate change. The drought that’s hit Cape Town and surrounding areas‚ officially the worst in recorded history‚ has done us all some good. All rights reserved. doi: 10.1038/nclimate2927, Taylor, K. E., R. J. Stouffer, and G. A. Meehl. Mahlalela is already working towards her next research paper, as part of her PhD, which focuses on the ongoing drought in the Eastern Cape. But some argue that the drought is a mild one, and that the root cause of the water crisis is poor planning and mismanagement on the part of the Western Cape Water Supply System (WCWSS). The second model is weather@home. The City would not provide us with historical consumption data. There’s not much time left, and Mahlalela stressed that action to conserve water needs to start now, especially as the population continues to increase and the demand for water grows. By. We use the standard risk-based multi-method approach to extreme event attribution employing station data, gridded observational dataset, as well as the CIMP5 archive, two coupled climate models and two atmosphere-land models to analyse whether and to what extent anthropogenic climate change altered the likelihood of the 2015-2017 Western Cape drought. Cape Town Observation History. In order to be able to compare models with observations we also utilise the gridded observational dataset CRU TS 4.01 at 0.5° horizontal resolution (it does not include 2017, which was taken from the GPCC dataset). The second ensemble represents possible weather in a world as it might have been without anthropogenic climate forcings. The graph below shows the decreased rainfall in the past two years for Theewaterskloof, the dam supplying more than half our water. Using the methods and models described above we calculate the risk ratios for a change of the 1 in 100 year event with respect to a world that might have been without climate change as well as how the likelihood of such an event could change in a world 2°C warmer than pre-industrial, 1°C warmer than today. Remember that a 1:100 year drought period, that the area has been experiencing, does not mean that this weather situation only occurs every 100 years – it could happen again in the next ten years. Drought monitoring – Continuous observation of rainfall levels and comparisons with current usage levels can help prevent man-made drought. Although the system was designed to provide sufficient water storage to mitigate droughts with a return interval of 1 in 50 years, this study shows that the return time of extreme droughts has changed due to climate change, leaving the system and the people it serves more vulnerable to drought risks than previously anticipated. Cape Town is in the middle of a drought. Professor Wolfgang Wagner, from the Vienna University of Technology, who carries out research and development in the framework of EUMETSAT’s Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management Satellite Application Facility (H SAF) pointed out that soil moisture levels can be a very good indicator of drought. The fact that the subject directly affects all Capetonians, as well as people beyond the province’s borders, was a bonus. and Adeola, A.M. (2017) Drought characteristics over the Western Cape Province, South Africa. Contact us. Baldasano, R. Bintanja, P. Bougeault, R. Caballero, A.M. Ekman, J.H. the pre-eminent source for learnings from the Cape Town water crisis During 2017-2018, in the grip of a multiyear drought of unprecedented severity, the South African city of Cape Town suffered a water crisis so severe that its four million residents faced the prospect of ‘Day Zero’. While dam levels have improved, and water restrictions were reduced from level 5 to level 3 at the end of 2018, water rationing remains in place. doi: 10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00255.1, Mahlanza, L., Ziervogel, G., & Scott, D. (2016) Water, rights and poverty: an environmental justice approach to analysing water management devices in Cape Town. doi: 10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00094.1, Wolski, P. (2018) How severe is Cape Town’s “Day Zero” drought? The agricultural sector is a key formal and informal employer in the Western Cape and provides inputs for other industry such as agri-processing. Baudoin, M-A, C. Vogel, K. Nortje and M. Naik. Cape provinces of South Africa where drought is becoming a permanent feature in the agricultural sector. Droughts in South Africa affect both the local and national economy, by adding pressure to the nation’s agro-economic system, including increased unemployment, negative impacts on upstream economic activities and production loss over several years (Baudoin et al., 2017). Heatwaves can be particularly dangerous to humans, and occur all over the world with increasing intensity. Drought affects people in many ways, from reduced water & food supplies to increasing the risk of wildfires. 2019; Muller 2017). It is a coupled Earth System Model. Water storage and distribution should become a key focus, and not only for the Western Cape. Nature Climate Change, 6, 627–634. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 93: 485–498. 2017, Wolski 2018). Graph constructed using data from National Department of Water and Sanitation. Water, 9: 876. doi: 10.3390/w9110876, Christidis, N., P.A. Everyone also wants to understand why we find ourselves in this situation,” Mahlalela explained. In fact, it still does. The capital city of the region, Cape Town was particularly affected by this rainfall deficit impacting the area directly surrounding the six large reservoirs that provide fresh water to the city of Cape Town and its ~3.7 million residents.