In Sub-Saharan Africa, mobility through transhumance is a much-valued strategy of pastoralists for dealing with rainfall variability (see Swallow 1994; van den Brink, Bromley, and Chavas 1995; Ellis and Swift 1988). Transhumance is generally practiced in the arid to semi-arid regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, an environment characterized by low mean rainfall and high rainfall variability. Higher r...

The most commonly used polarimetric radar measurements in rainfall estimation are the reflectivity factor, usually at horizontal polarization (Zh), differential reflectivity (Zdr) and specific differential propagation phase (Kdp). Based on the above three measurements, a number of algorithms have been derived in the literature to estimate rainfall (see Bringi and Chandrasekar, 2001 for a summar...

Interruption of monsoon rainfall by prolonged spells of sparse rainfall (break-monsoon) during the midmonsoon months of July and August over the plains of northern India (20°-29'N, 75O-85'E) has been investigated. When a tropical low-pressure system moves from the plains in a northerly direction toward the submontane region of the Himalaya, the monsoon trough of low pressure also moves from the...

[1] This paper expands the one-dimensionally based CTP-HIlow framework for describing atmospheric controls on soil moisture-boundary layer interactions [Findell and Eltahir, 2003] to three dimensions by including low-level wind effects in the analysis. The framework is based on two measures of atmospheric thermodynamic properties: the convective triggering potential (CTP), a measure of the temp...

In areas of the world where malaria prevails under unstable conditions, attacking the adult vector population through insecticide-based Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) is the most common method for controlling epidemics. Defined in policy guidance, the use of Annual Parasitic Incidence (API) is an important tool for assessing the effectiveness of control and for planning new interventions. To in...

This study examines the contribution of tropical sea surface temperature (SST) forcing to the 1976/77 climate transition of the winter atmospheric circulation over the North Pacific using a combined observational and modeling approach. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Atmospheric Model version 3 (CAM3) simulates approximately 75% of the observed 4-hPa deepening of t...

Maintaining pasture ground cover is important in preventing environmental degradation of grasslands and associated riparian areas. The objective of this work was to determine the effect of ground cover on sediment and P export from pastured riparian areas under simulated rainfall events. Plots were established on two sites in the North Carolina Piedmont: a 10% slope with Appling sandy loam soil...

Central equatorial Africa is deficient in long-term, ground-based measurements of rainfall; therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the accuracy of three high-resolution, satellite-based rainfall products in western Uganda for the 2001–10 period. The three products are African Rainfall Climatology, version 2 (ARC2); African Rainfall Estimation Algorithm, version 2 (RFE2); and 3B42 from th...