Satellite-derived retrievals of precipitation have increased in availability and improved in quality over the last decade. There are now several satellites in orbit with instruments capable of precipitation retrieval with various degrees of accuracy, spatial resolution and temporal sampling. These retrievals have the advantage of almost full global coverage when compared to surface gauges and g...

There is a direct influence of global warming on precipitation. Increased heating leads to greater evaporation and thus surface drying, thereby increasing the intensity and duration of drought. However, the water holding capacity of air increases by about 7% per 1°C warming, which leads to increased water vapor in the atmosphere. Hence, storms, whether individual thunderstorms, extratropical ra...

The Dongting Lake Basin (DTLB) of China is a flood prone area. Knowledge of the spatiotemporal characteristics and risks of precipitation extremes is essential for flood mitigation. Based on the precipitation amount (R), precipitation intensity (Ri), max 1 day precipitation amount (Rx1) and max 5 day precipitation amount (Rx5), this study analyzed the spatial-temporal patterns, risks and invest...

Temperature and precipitation extremes and their potential future changes are evaluated in an ensemble of global coupled climate models participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) diagnostic exercise for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Climate extremes are expressed in terms of 20-yr return values of annual extremes of near-surface temperature and 24-h precipitatio...

Precipitation during 2001-2016 over the northern and central part of Tuscany was studied in order to characterize the rainfall regime. The dataset consisted of hourly cumulative rainfall series recorded by a network of 801 rain gauges. The territory was divided into 30x30 km square areas, the annual, seasonal and daily Average Cumulative Rainfall (ACR) in all areas was estimated along with its ...

An understanding of past hydroclimatic variability is critical to resolving the significance of recent recorded trends in Australian precipitation and informing climate models. Our aim was to reconstruct past hydroclimatic variability in semi-arid northwest Australia to provide a longer context within which to examine a recent period of unusually high summer-autumn precipitation. We developed a...

Satellite observations of temperature, water vapor, precipitation and longwave radiation are used to characterize the variation of the tropical hydrologic and energy budgets associated with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). As the tropical oceans warm during an El Niño event, the precipitation intensity, water vapor mass, and temperature of the tropical atmosphere are observed to increas...

Precipitation accumulations, integrated over rainfall events, can be affected by both intensity and duration of the storm event. Thus, although precipitation intensity is widely projected to increase under global warming, a clear framework for predicting accumulation changes has been lacking, despite the importance of accumulations for societal impacts. Theory for changes in the probability den...

An atmospheric GCM coupled to a slab ocean model is used to investigate how temperature and precipitation over South America and Africa affect the annual cycle of the Atlantic ITCZ. The main conclusion of this study is that variations in precipitation and temperature forced by the annual cycle of insolation over the continents are as important as variations in insolation over the ocean and in o...