| Abstract |
On 05 June 2024, reliefweb called for urgent support, on behalf of the United Nations and their partners, and reported that more than 30 million people across southern Africa have been affected by a severe drought. The severe drought is believed to be a consequence of the impacts of the El Niño event, and a climate-driven crisis (reliefweb 2024).
The WMO (World Meteorological Organisation) recommends that the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) be used by all National Meteorological and Hydrological Services to characterise meteorological droughts (WMO 2012).
A drought starts when the SPI has a value of –1 or less. The drought duration ends when the SPI becomes positive.
Another index to characterize drought is the simple percent of normal precipitation (WMO 2016). Normal precipitation is the average of 30 years of monthly precipitation data. Similarly, instead of the normal, the average may be used.
Both indexes used by SASSCAL to demonstrate the severity of the drought clearly indicate that much of southern Africa already experienced a drought after the 2022/23 rainfall year, that was aggravated by the lack of rain in the 2023/24 rainfall season.
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