Models had predicted a drought that, by late January, was stunting the growth of maize in Zimbabwe. By Paul VoosenThe Indian Ocean seemed ready to hit Africa with a one-two punch.
It was September 2019, and the waters off the Horn of Africa were ominously hot. Every few years, natural swings in the ocean can lead to such a warming, drastically altering weather on land—and setting the stage for flooding rains in East Africa.
But at the same time, a second ocean shift was brewing. An unusually cold pool of water threatened to park itself south of Madagascar, leading to equally extreme, but opposite, weather farther south on the continent: drought.Half a world away, at the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) of the University of California, Santa