Climate model simulations uniformly show drier and warmer summers in the Eurasian midcontinent during the mid-Holocene, which is not consistent with paleoenvironmental observations. The simulated climate results from a reduction in the zonal temperature gradient, which weakens westerly flow and reduces moisture flux and precipitation in the midcontinent. As a result, sensible heating is favored...

Intrato multi-decadal (IMD) variation in terrestrial precipitation during 1901–98 was evaluated here by sampling annual precipitation rankings over 6–30 year moving time windows and converting those rankings to Mann-Whitney U statistics. Those U statistics were then used to identify the most significant concentrations of wet and dry years relative to a null hypothesis that assumes stationary cl...

A large decrease in the land surface albedo of the Loess Plateau was observed from 2000 to 2010, as measured using satellite imagery. In particular, ecological restoration program regions experienced a decrease in peak season land surface albedo exceeding 0.05. In this study, we examined the spatial and temporal patterns of variation during the peak season albedo in the Loess Plateau and analyz...

BACKGROUND, AIM AND SCOPE During the last decades ecological conditions in West Africa have dramatically changed. Very evident is the climate change, which has resulted in a southward shift of the climate zones, e.g. a spread of the desert (Sahara) into the Sahelian zone. After the drought period of the early 1970s and 1980s, livestock density increased resulting in an intensification of grazin...

This ten-year general circulation model experiment compared a simulation where land surface boundary conditions were represented by observed, present day land cover to a simulation where the surface was represented by natural, potential land cover conditions. As a result of these estimated changes in historical land cover, signi®cant temperature and hydrology changes a€ected tropical land surfa...

Using a recent Leaf Area Index (LAI) dataset and the Community Land Model version 4 (CLM4), we investigated percent changes and controlling factors of global vegetation growth for the period 1982 to 2009. Over that 28-year period, both the remote-sensing estimate and model simulation show a significant increasing trend in annual vegetation growth. Latitudinal asymmetry appeared in both products...

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is a key region of land–atmosphere interactions with severe eco-environment degradation. This study uses an atmospheric general circulation model, NCEP GCM/SSiB, to present the major TP summer climate features for six selected ENSO years and preliminarily assess the possible impact of land cover change on the summer circulation over the TP. Compared to Reanalysis II dat...

Functional Data Analysis (FDA) has recently made considerable progress because of easier access to the data that are essentially in the form of curves. Although functional modeling of Iranian precipitation based on temperature or humidity was done before, here we use functional analysis of variance and covariance to analyze the weather data collected randomly from Iranian weather stations in 20...

Net primary productivity (NPP) is a key component of energy and matter transformation in the terrestrial ecosystem, and the responses of NPP to global change locally and regionally have been one of the most important aspects in climate–vegetation relationship studies. In order to isolate causal climatic factors, it is great meaningful to assess the response of seasonal variation of NPP to clima...