Northeastern Brazil, an example of vulnerable semi-arid regions on the earth, is characterised by water scarcity and vulnerability of .natural resources, pronounced climatic variability and social stress situations. Integrated studies involving hydrology, ecology, meteorology, climatology, pedology, agronomy, and social and economic sciences are required not only for analysing consequences of t...

Understanding nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes from agricultural soils in semi-arid regions is required to better understand global terrestrial N2O losses. Nitrous oxide fluxes were measured from three rain-fed, cropped soils in a semi-arid region of south-western Australia on a sub-daily basis from 1995 to 2014 using automated chambers. Western Australia’s grain-belt includes 7 million hectares of a...

Riparian zones in semi-arid regions often exhibit high rates of evapotranspiration (ET) in spite of low soil moisture content due to vegetation that is able to withdraw water from shallow aquifers. This work better defines the relationship between ET and the saturated zone by comparing the observed water table drawdown to analytically modeled drawdown in fully penetrating wells of an unconfined...

Early warning systems (EWS) tend to focus on the identification of slow onset disasters such famine and epidemic disease. Since hazardous environmental conditions often precede disastrous outcomes by many months, effective monitoring via satellite and in situ observations can successfully guide mitigation activities. Accurate short term forecasts of NDVI could increase lead times, making early ...

Estimation of impervious surface area is important to the study of urban environments and social development, but surface characteristics, as well as the temporal, spectral, and spatial resolutions of remote sensing images, influence the estimation accuracy. To investigate the effects of regional environmental characteristics on the estimation of impervious surface area, we divided China into s...

1 Introduction Accurate quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) is one of the most important elements in meteorological and hydrologic analyses. It has been long recognized, however, that rain gauge networks are usually inadequate because of their limited distribution. During the last decades intense scientific efforts have been devoted to utilize remote sensing information for the estimati...

Arid regions are an important part of the world as they cover more than 40% of the land surface and they can provide sufficient opportunities for extensive development. However, urban development of these regions is facing a set of problems. This is besides the development barriers due to the arid regions climate associated with a set of economical, social, administrative, and physical problems...