Alarming! Climate change to transform Lake Victoria into `thunderstorm hotspot`

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: A new study conducted at the University of Leuven in Belgium has furnished a detail that climate change could possibly transform East Africa's Lake Victoria into a dangerous thunderstorm hotspot.

This comes as a major threat to over 200,000 fishermen who ply its waters at night.

According to the International Red Cross, some 3,000 to 5,000 fishermen lose their lives in violent storms on the lake every year.

Superstorms that only occur once every 15 years today would, if global warming continues apace, happen annually by century's end, said the study published in Nature Communications.

The basic weather pattern that causes night-time storms over Victoria exists already, but would be amplified, explained lead author Wim Thiery, a researcher at the University of Leuven.

"During the day, a breeze develops that flows from the cool water towards the warm land," he said in a statement.

"At night, we see the opposite: the land breeze flows away from the cooling land," converging over the warmer, oval lake.

"Add evaporation to this cocktail, and you get a lot of storms, rain, wind and waves," he said.

(With PTI inputs)