The topic is very relevant and important because seasonal prediction is still a very active area of research. Thus, any advance in this area will be welcome. However, I am not convinced about the interpretation and the mechanism that connects mixing in summer with rainfall in winter. As the authors mention other works have already found a connection between summertime north Atlantic SST and win...

We used a data mining algorithm to evolve fuzzy association rules between the atmospheric indices and the Summer Monsoon Rainfall of All-India and two homogenous regions (Peninsular and West central). El Nino and Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Equatorial Indian Ocean Oscillation zonal wind index (EQWIN) indices are used as the causative variables. Rules extracted are showing a negative relatio...

The regional climate model HIRHAM has been applied over the Asian continent from 0oN to 50oN and 42oE to 110oE to simulate the Indian monsoon circulation under past and present-day conditions. The model is driven at the lateral and lower boundaries by the atmospheric output fields of the global coupled Earth system model ECHAM5JSBACH/MPIOM for 44-years-long time slices during the mid-Holocene a...

Here we develop a numerical model to investigate the hypothesis proposed by a companion paper [Eltahir, this issue], which describes a soil moisture–rainfall feedback mechanism. The model is designed to describe the seasonal evolution of the West African monsoon rainfall and is used to perform numerical experiments that elucidate the mechanisms of the response of rainfall to soil moisture anoma...

The Most Expected Rainfall Regime – MERR in a certain region is composed of various parameters regarding the annual rainfall regime in that region. The present study examines several parameters of the MERR, such as: the rainfall TOTAL, the Date of Accumulated Percentage-DAP, the Rainy Season Length-RSL, the Number of Rain-Spells-NRS, the Rain-Spell Yield-RSY, the ratio between Average and Media...

Summer rainfall in the Sahel region of Africa exhibits one of the largest signals of climatic variability and with a population reliant on agricultural productivity, the Sahel is particularly vulnerable to major droughts such as occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainfall levels have subsequently recovered, but future projections remain uncertain. Here we show that Sahel rainfall is skilfully pre...

Six-state discrete simple Markov chain models are applied to the 5-day spatial rainfall features during the summer monsoon for 30 years (1964–1993) over 33 meteorological subdivisions of India to understand the persistence behaviour of the spatial coverage of rainfall and the underlying time-evolutionary processes on the synoptic scale. The stochastic models are cross validated on 5 years of in...

Understanding the responses of cork oak (Quercus suber L.) to actual and predicted summer conditions is essential to determine the future sustainability of cork oak woodlands in Iberia. Thermal imaging may provide a rapid method for monitoring the extent of stress. The ecophysiology of cork trees was studied over three years. Three treatments were applied by means of rainfall capture and irriga...

Rainfall anomalies over southern China are found to be asymmetricly influenced by the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), with a far stronger influence from positive IOD (pIOD) events. A greater convection anomaly and an equivalent-barotropic Rossby wave train response occurs during pIOD events than during negative IOD (nIOD) events. Over the Bay of Bengal (BOB) and South China Sea (SCS), an associated ...

The paper highlights the growing concern of the impact of climate change and variability including rainfall anomaly, rising temperature in mountain areas and occurrence of heat waves in relation to human mortality pattern in India. The paper investigates the historical perspective of rainfall and malaria relationship, and cited current studies to show how climate change and variability resulted...