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Womens work was a magazine edited by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood that featured text-based and instructional performance scores by twenty-five women artists. In the original publication of Issue 1, Nye Ffarrabas appeared as Bici Forbes and Annea Lockwood appeared as Anna Lockwood. In the original publication of Issue 2, Ann Noël appeared as Ann Williams.

Since 1982, extreme daily rainfall in the western Sahel has increased persistently, owing to a warmer Sahara which has led to increased wind shear and an increase in intense storms. More storms as desert warms A warming climate is expected to increase the frequency of extreme rainfall events because warmer air can support higher humidity, but other mechanisms may also be at work. Christopher Taylor et al . show that increases in extreme rainfall in the western Sahel region of Africa since 1982 are driven by a larger gradient in temperature across the region caused by a warmer Sahara desert to the north. In turn, the sharper gradient increases wind shear and seems to have led to the frequency of mesoscale convective systems—which are exactly the kind of weather systems likely to generate extreme rainfall—tripling since 1982. The spatial patterns of global warming are likely to further increase the temperature gradient and intensify mesoscale convective systems, leading to more extreme rainfall events. The hydrological cycle is expected to intensify under global warming 1 , with studies reporting more frequent extreme rain events in many regions of the world 2 , 3 , 4 , and predicting increases in future flood frequency 5 . Such early, predominantly mid-latitude observations are essential because of shortcomings within climate models in their depiction of convective rainfall 6 , 7 . A globally important group of intense storms—mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) 8 —poses a particular challenge, because they organize dynamically on spatial scales that cannot be resolved by conventional climate models. Here, we use 35 years of satellite observations from the West African Sahel to reveal a persistent increase in the frequency of the most intense MCSs. Sahelian storms are some of the most powerful on the planet 9 , and rain gauges in this region have recorded a rise in ‘extreme’ 17 daily rainfall totals. We find that intense MCS frequency is only weakly related to the multidecadal recovery of Sahel annual rainfall, but is highly correlated with global land temperatures. Analysis of trends across Africa reveals that MCS intensification is limited to a narrow band south of the Sahara desert. During this period, wet-season Sahelian temperatures have not risen, ruling out the possibility that rainfall has intensified in response to locally warmer conditions. On the other hand, the meridional temperature gradient spanning the Sahel has increased in recent decades, consistent with anthropogenic forcing driving enhanced Saharan warming 10 . We argue that Saharan warming intensifies convection within Sahelian MCSs through increased wind shear and changes to the Saharan air layer. The meridional gradient is projected to strengthen throughout the twenty-first century, suggesting that the Sahel will experience particularly marked increases in extreme rain. The remarkably rapid intensification of Sahelian MCSs since the 1980s sheds new light on the response of organized tropical convection to global warming, and challenges conventional projections made by general circulation models.

The advanced microwave sounding unit (AMSU) ‐A and ‐B sensors provide observations of humidity and temperature that are relevant for meteorological and climate studies. The use of these observations in numerical weather prediction models has increased in the past 10 years because of some improvements in data assimilation. However, an appropriate use of AMSU measurements apart from assimilation context is rather difficult and depends for the most part on how successfully the instrumental characteristics are accounted for. In particular, atmosphere humidity and temperature variations can be completely hidden by features because of the effect of the observation zenith angle. In this paper, 8 years of AMSU‐A and ‐B observations have been corrected from the observations zenith angle effect and have been used to study temperature and humidity variations over West Africa. Comparisons have been made between AMSU observations and selected atmospheric fields from European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts analyses as well as outgoing longwave radiation estimates. It has been found that observations from AMSU‐A channel 5 can be used to monitor the heat low evolution and that AMSU‐B observations from channels 3 and 5 are well adapted to study the humidity variations in direct link with the African monsoon from intraseasonal to interannual scales.