For several days, Northern Africa, particularly the Saharan and sub-Saharan regions, has been experiencing precipitation far above the average, and this is not a brief episode. The significant rainfall anomaly is expected to continue during September. The ensemble rainfall anomaly forecast shows that a large part of the Saharan desert will experience a severe rainfall anomaly in the next two weeks and possibly could continue. It is predicted that a large part of the Sahara will get well over 500% of normal monthly rainfall during September. If it is considered the total yearly amount, many regions have a few years worth of rain in a few days.
The first week of September is shaping up to be the wettest in the last 50 years for some countries, including Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, with likely historic records. Forecast models predict peaks in the middle of the Sahara Desert of up to 350/400mm in Mali and up to 150/200mm between Niger, Chad, and Sudan. Cities like Timbuktu could see in one week triple the amount of rain they usually receive in an entire year, while in the heart of the desert, annual average thresholds could be exceeded by as much as 100 times! The cause of this imbalance is an anomalous shift of the sub-equatorial precipitation zone much further north than usual.