In this paper, Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks–Climate Data Record (PERSIANN-CDR) is analyzed for the assessment of meteorological drought. The evaluation is conducted over China at 0.5 ̋ spatial resolution against a ground-based gridded China monthly Precipitation Analysis Product (CPAP) from 1983 to 2014 (32 years). The Standardized Pr...

[1] A state‐of‐the‐art ensemble of regional climate model (RCM) simulations provided by the European Union–funded project ENSEMBLES is used to test the ability of RCMs to reproduce the mean and extreme precipitation regimes over Spain. To this aim, ERA‐40– driven simulations at 25 km resolution are compared with the 20 km daily precipitation grid Spain02, considering the period 1960–2000. This ...

The south-west of Western Australia has experienced significant land-cover change as well as a decline in rainfall. Given that the majority of precipitation results from frontal passages, the impact of land-cover change on the dynamics of cold fronts is explored using the Regional Atmospheric Modelling System version 6.0. Frontal simulations are evaluated against high resolution atmospheric sou...

Extreme precipitation events can lead to severe mountain hazards, and they have therefore received widespread attention. The study of extreme be hindered by the insufficient number uneven distribution rain gauge stations, especially in mountainous areas with complex terrain. In this study, daily data three gridded products (Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM, IMERG; Multi-Source Weig...

Passive and active observations at L band (frequency ∼ 1.4GHz) from the Aquarius/SAC-D mission offer new capabilities to study the polar regions. Due to the lack of polar-gridded products, however, applications over the cryosphere have been limited. We present three weekly polar-gridded products of Aquarius data to improve our understanding of L-band observations of ice sheets, sea ice, permafr...

Droughts are one of the most damaging climate-related hazards. The late 1960s Sahel drought in Africa and the North American Dust Bowl of the 1930s are two examples of severe droughts that have an impact on society and the environment. Due to the importance of understanding droughts, we consider the problem of their detection based on gridded datasets of precipitation. We formulate the problem ...

[1] A method is presented to determine tropopause height from gridded temperature data with coarse vertical resolution. The algorithm uses a thermal definition of the tropopause, which is based on the concept of a ‘‘threshold lapse-rate’’. Interpolation is performed to identify the pressure at which this threshold is reached and maintained for a prescribed vertical distance. The method is verif...

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 ...