The influence of forest loss on rainfall remains poorly understood. Addressing this challenge Spracklen et al. recently presented a pan-tropical study of rainfall and landcover that showed that satellite-derived rainfall measures were positively correlated with the degree to which model-derived air trajectories had been exposed to forest cover. This result confirms the influence of vegetation o...

Wet deposition of solutes to an alpine catchment in the southern Sierra Nevada was measured from October 1984 through March 1988. Rainfall had a volume-weighted pH of 4.9, and snowfall had a volume-weighted pH of 5.3. Acetic and formic acids were important components of all wet deposition, contributing 25-30% of the measured anions in snowfall and, through analysis of charge balance deficits, t...

An X-band dual-polarization radar (XPRAD) was deployed in Guangdong province as part of the Southern China Monsoon Rainfall Experiment (SCMREX) during the storm season in 2016. This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of XPRAD observations during SCMREX with emphasis on data processing and rainfall products. The differential phase-based attenuation correction and radar calibration using s...

As the concept of sustainable communities is gaining increasing recognition around the world it is of critical importance to investigate the water quality of urban environments. The contamination of waterways in urban communities seriously affects the utility of water for different purposes and degrades the aesthetic value of natural watercourses. Research investigations in the past have genera...

BACKGROUND Diarrhea among children under 5 years of age has long been a major public health concern. Previous studies have suggested an association between rainfall and diarrhea. Here, we examined the association between Rwandan rainfall patterns and childhood diarrhea and the impact of household sanitation variables on this relationship. METHODS We derived a series of rain-related variables ...

[1] Africa is thought to be a large source of interannual variability in the global carbon cycle, only vaguely attributed to climate fluctuations. This study uses a biophysical model, Simple Biosphere, to examine in detail what specific factors, physiological (acute stress from low soil water, temperature, or low humidity) and biophysical (low vegetation radiation use), are responsible for spat...

Seasonal abundance and parity in Culicoides populations, in the vicinity of livestock, were determined at seven sites in five different climatic regions with 220 V down-draught blacklight-traps. In 418 collections made between October 1983 and December 1986, a total of 2,134,171 Culicoides, of which 342,571 were identified to species level and sexed, were collected; 267 of these collections (18...

The authors analyze information from rain gauges, geostationary infrared satellites, and low earth orbiting radar in order to describe and characterize the submesoscale ( 75 km) spatial pattern and temporal dynamics of rainfall in a 50 km 75 km study area located in Sonora, Mexico, in the periphery of the North American monsoon system core region. The temporal domain spans from 1 July to 31 Aug...

A data-driven method for extracting temporally persistent information, at different spatial scales, from rainfall data (as measured by radar/satellite) is described, which extends the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) algorithm into two dimensions. The EMD technique is used here to decompose spatial rainfall data into a sequence of high through to low frequency components. This process is equi...