What drives daily precipitation over the central Amazon? Differences observed between wet and dry seasons

A nonparametric wet/dry spell model for resampling daily precipitation

A nonparametric wet/dry spell model is developed for resampling daily precipitation at a site. The model considers alternating sequences of wet and dry days in a given season of the year. All marginal, joint, and conditional probability densities of interest (e.g., dry spell length, wet spell length, precipitation amount, and wet spell length given prior to dry spell length) are estimated nonpa...

Dry and wet rainy seasons in the Mantaro river basin (Central Peruvian Andes)

Monthly precipitation data from the period of 1970 to 2004 from 38 meteorological stations in the Mantaro river basin were used to classify the rainy seasons (September–April) of each year into anomalously dry or wet, and to determine the basin-wide extent of the anomalies based on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). The wet periods mostly occurred in the early 1970’s and during the fir...

Monitoring wet and dry process using precipitation changes

The decreasing range between dry- and wet- season precipitation over land and its effect on vegetation primary productivity

One consequence of climate change is the alteration of global water fluxes, both in amount and seasonality. As a result, the seasonal difference between dry- (p < 100 mm/month) and wet-season (p > 100 mm/month) precipitation (p) has increased over land during recent decades (1980-2005). However, our analysis expanding to a 60-year period (1950-2009) showed the opposite trend. This is, dry-seaso...

What Drives Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?

While previous empirical analysis of deforestation focused on population, this paper builds from a model of land use which suggests many determinants of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. I derive a deforestation equation from this model and test a number of those factors using county-level data for the period 1978]1988. The data include a satellite deforestation measure which allows improv...