BACKGROUND Patterns of concerted fluctuation in populations-synchrony-can reveal impacts of climatic variability on disease dynamics. We examined whether malaria transmission has been synchronous in an area with a common rainfall regime and sensitive to the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), a global climatic phenomenon affecting weather patterns in East Africa. METHODS We studied malaria synchrony i...

In the wet-dry tropics of northern Australia, temperatures are high and stable year-round but monsoonal rainfall is highly seasonal and variable both annually and spatially. Many features of reproduction in vertebrates of this region may be adaptations to dealing with this unpredictable variation in precipitation, notably by (i) using direct proximate (rainfall-affected) cues to synchronize the...

There are limitations in using monthly rainfall totals in studies of rainfall climatology as well as in hydrological and agricultural investigations. Variations in rainfall may be considered to result from frequency changes in the daily rainfall of the respective regime. In the present study, daily rainfall data of the stations inside the Koyna catchment has been analysed for the period of 1961...

African societies are dependent on rainfall for agricultural and other water-dependent activities, yet rainfall is extremely variable in both space and time and reoccurring water shocks, such as drought, can have considerable social and economic impacts. To help improve our knowledge of the rainfall climate, we have constructed a 30 year (1983–2012), temporally consistent rainfall data set for ...

African societies are dependent on rainfall for agricultural and other water-dependent activities, yet rainfall is extremely variable in both space and time and reoccurring water shocks, such as drought, can have considerable social and economic impacts. To help improve our knowledge of the rainfall climate, we have constructed a 30 year (1983–2012), temporally consistent rainfall data set for ...

Observation of the vertical profile of precipitation over the global tropics is a key objective of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) because this information is central to obtaining vertical profiles of latent heating. The present study combines both TRMM Precipitation Radar (PR) and Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) data to examine “wet-season” vertical structures of tropical precipi...

Seasonal climate variability is a major source of production risks. The majority of crop failures in the U.S. are associated with either a lack or excess of rainfall (Ibarra and Hewitt, 1999). Climate variability is also associated with other sources of production risks such as pest and disease incidence. Weather patterns, including high temperature and humidity, and the potential for daily rai...

The aim of this article is to explore ways of increasing agricultural productivity in Zimbabwe in the face of the increasingly uncertain climatic conditions. Agriculture has remained crucial to economic growth in Zimbabwe while it is mainly rain-fed. The total seasonal rainfall amounts are not indicating any significant trend (increasing or decreasing) with time. Changes are only noticed in the...

This study aimed to determine the variability of carbon and nitrogen elemental content, stoichiometry and diet proportions of invertebrates in two sub-tropical estuaries in South Africa experiencing seasonal changes in rainfall and river inflow. The elemental ratios and stable isotopes of abiotic sources, zooplankton and macrozoobenthos taxa were analyzed over a dry/wet seasonal cycle. Nutrient...