The African Sahel region is characterized by hydrological extremes, with alternating drought and flood conditions that drastically affect the agriculture-based economy through crop failures, which have resulted in chronic malnourishment, prevalence of disease, and amplification of civil unrest.

Furthermore, the African Sahel is also the genesis region for the African easterly waves, some 10% of which result in hurricanes that traverse the Atlantic and make landfall in the Caribbean nations and the eastern and southern U.S.

At the same time, very few in-situ observations exist across the Sahel, even during recent decades, and the relative paucity of such climatological observations for the African Sahel inhibits hydrological prediction in the region.

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program, Mobile Facility (AMF), conducted a year-long deployment at Niamey, Niger in 2006 to coincide with the large international experiment in the region, the African Monsoon Multi-disciplinary Analysis (AMMA).

Combined measurements from the AMF W-band ARM Cloud Radar (WACR), Micro-Pulse lidar (MPL) and ceilometer were used to develop a WACR-based version of ARM's Active Remote Sensing of CLouds (ARSCL) product that consists of cloud location, boundaries (for up to 10 layers), and radar moments, this with a temporal resolution of 5 seconds and a vertical resolution of 45 meters.

In this study, we used the four daily Niamey soundings to compute various convective parameters, such as convective available potential energy (CAPE), convective inhibition (CIN), lifting condensation level (LCL), and level of free convection (LFC). If adiabatically computed, these parameters are neither representative of the observed atmospheric stability, as derived from skew-T/log-P diagrams, nor are they representative of the realized cloud structure, observed using the WACR ARSCL cloud products.

We investigate the role of the 5-km thick Niamey dust layer as the source for diabatic heating to explain this discrepancy.