Summertime Climatology of Mesoscale Convective Systems over West Africa from 24-years of METEOSAT observations

The West African monsoon hydrological cycle and heat budget strongly depends on the Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCS). The analysis of the morphology of these tropical convective systems has received much attention in the past decades mainly thanks to the advent of geostationary infrared data. A number of definitions have been proposed yielding to a complex corpus of knowledge. In this context, a unique climatology of Mesoscale Convective Systems has been computed from the Meteosat IR observations, over tropical Africa, during the summer monsoon from 1983 to 2006 based on a simple definition of the MCS.