ICTP Associate Marie-Claudine Andriamampianina has altered her field of study to take advantage of the opportunities presented by ICTP's Weather and Climate Group.

Islands of Information

A geophysicist by training, ICTP Associate Marie-Claudine Andriamampianina has recently shifted the focus of her research to the physics of weather and climate. The reason: Although surrounded by water, Madagascar has been increasingly plagued by drought and spreading desertification, especially the southern third of this island nation. While other island nations worry about the erosive impact of rising sea levels on the integrity of their shorelines (some nations even fret about eventually being swallowed up by sea water), Malagasy scientists fear that alterations in the environment will accelerate evaporative processes and create even drier conditions in regions of their country that already thirst for more water.

"The problem," explains Andriamampianina, "is due to two factors. First, unwise land use practices--notably, widespread careless cutting of forests and burning of underbrush--have reduced the soil's water-retaining qualities. Second, the regional effects of global warming have made southern Madagascar a bit warmer and drier."

Studying trends in the regional climate of Madagascar, Andriamampianina explains, could help her nation better understand the forces at work and thus become a critical factor in devising effective solutions--or, perhaps more realistically, adjustments--to climate-related problems that threaten the future environmental well-being of a third of Madagascar's land mass.

"We are a relatively small country with a sparse population," notes Andriamampianina. "Our per capita income is less than US$300 a year; our economy is largely resource-based (coffee, cloves, vanilla beans and rice constitute our major crops); and, despite a lush humid corridor along the east coast and fertile valleys in the central plateau, the fact is that less than 5 percent of the land is arable. All these factors mean that we can ill-afford to ignore the potential adverse impacts of a drier, more arid, climate."

While Andriamampianina is convinced that her new research focus can make a difference for her nation, she realises that Madagascar's isolation (another consequence of geography), combined with its limited resources, make it impossible for her to study regional climate patterns at home. "We have internet access," she says, "but the connections are slow and prohibitively expensive to use. That's why when I come to ICTP, I download and print as much information as possible. I then take the printed copies home with me to use as source material both for my research and teaching."

But it's not just the data that she finds valuable; it's also the training she receives at ICTP that has helped place her research and teaching on a firm footing. Andriamampianina was selected as an ICTP Associate in 1997 and visited Trieste for the first time in 1998 to attend the Colloquium on the Physics of Weather and Climate: The Effect of Topography on the Atmospheric Circulation. She has returned this summer for the Colloquium on Chemistry-Climate Interactions.

"When people read about global warming, the first question they often ask is whether the world is getting warmer. But the most meaningful impacts are likely to take place on a regional scale, and depend largely on how global climate trends interact with environmental conditions that vary from one place to the next. The regional focus of ICTP's Weather and Climate Group, together with its emphasis on the developing world, make the group a particular useful member of the climate change research community. As the potential impacts of global warming move to the top of the science agenda in nations like my own, there's a good chance that the Centre will be one of the places that we turn to both for access to the latest data and for high-quality training."

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