In the West region of Cameroon, very heavy rains have been recorded over the past thirty days, completely filling the soil reservoirs and covering the needs of the plants.
However, the excessive rainfall in a short period of time has left the region reckoning with damage to infrastructure and several buildings and, in the case of cocoa, with widespread waterlogging.
The latter certainly led to massive fruit wilting and it is likely that, in the worst cases, the trees even lost part of their foliage.
The Cameroonian crop has taken a heavy blow and will not recover in terms of arrivals for the next 3-4 months.
2 thoughts on “Precipitation monitoring in the West region of Cameroon”
Peter BAKER
Excellent graph … shows how chaotic rainfall is and how meaningless long term averages can be.
Also, how impossible to predict over long periods. I.e. was there any prior notion/indication that 2022 would be so different from 2021 even though both are ‘Nina’ years?
Hi Peter,
Actually, despite the strong-held belief in the cocoa community that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO, that La Niña is part of) has an important effect on the climatic conditions in the West African cocoa-producing regions, rigorous climate analyses (by several different research groups) do not find that to be the case.
The only robust teleconnection that the historical data to date has allowed to prove in this context is a link between La Niña and a tendency for below-average temperatures in Ivory Coast and Ghana.
The observational data to date does not show any significant effect of ENSO on precipitation anywhere in the West African cocoa belt.
One could argue that there may still be a link between very strong El Niño or La Niña events and weather in the African cocoa regions. Since there have been very few such extreme ENSO events in recorded history, this cannot yet be verified.
In any case, since the ongoing La Niña has only reached moderate levels, it was not expected that it would influence precipitations in the West African cocoa belt in any significant way, so it is not at all surprising that precipitations this year in Cameroon differ greatly from last year’s while both are La Niña years.
Excellent graph … shows how chaotic rainfall is and how meaningless long term averages can be.
Also, how impossible to predict over long periods. I.e. was there any prior notion/indication that 2022 would be so different from 2021 even though both are ‘Nina’ years?
Hi Peter,
Actually, despite the strong-held belief in the cocoa community that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO, that La Niña is part of) has an important effect on the climatic conditions in the West African cocoa-producing regions, rigorous climate analyses (by several different research groups) do not find that to be the case.
The only robust teleconnection that the historical data to date has allowed to prove in this context is a link between La Niña and a tendency for below-average temperatures in Ivory Coast and Ghana.
The observational data to date does not show any significant effect of ENSO on precipitation anywhere in the West African cocoa belt.
One could argue that there may still be a link between very strong El Niño or La Niña events and weather in the African cocoa regions. Since there have been very few such extreme ENSO events in recorded history, this cannot yet be verified.
In any case, since the ongoing La Niña has only reached moderate levels, it was not expected that it would influence precipitations in the West African cocoa belt in any significant way, so it is not at all surprising that precipitations this year in Cameroon differ greatly from last year’s while both are La Niña years.