Understanding how landscapes respond to climate dynamics in terms of macroscale (average topographic features) and microscale (landform reorganization) is of interest both for deciphering past climates from today’s landscapes and for predicting future landscapes in view of recent climatic trends. Although several studies have addressed macro-scale response, only a few have focused on quantifyin...

This study describes an EOF-based technique for statistical downscaling of high spatial resolution monthly mean precipitation from large scale reanalysis circulation fields. The method is demonstrated and evaluated for four widely-separated locations: the Southeast United States, the Upper Colorado River Basin, China’s Jiangxi Province, and Central Europe. For each location, the EOF-based downs...

Observations indicate a precipitation decline over large parts of southern Africa since the 1950s. Concurrently, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols have increased due to anthropogenic activities. Here we show that local black carbon and organic carbon aerosol emissions from biomass burning activities are a main cause of the observed decline in southern African dry seaso...

The relationships between species richness and driving factors might vary with taxa and spatial scale. For this study we used plant species data of eight groups from nature reserves in China, namely pteridophytes, gymnosperms, angiosperms, vascular plants, Chinese endemic species, rare and endangered plants, woody plants, and herbaceous plants, and eight putative environmental predictors to exp...

The paper studies changes in daily precipitation records at the National Observatory, Athens, during the period 1891–2004. This is the longest available time series of precipitation for Greece. The results show that both the shape and scale parameter of a fitted two parameter gamma distribution for the last two decades do show a significant difference of these parameters, when compared to any p...

Over a number of years a terminology and a number of concepts that were used originally as a first step in formulating a problem became broadly accepted and acquired an established status not compatible with their lack of precision. One such concept is “stratiform” precipitation as opposed to “convective” precipitation. The characteristics of precipitation from these two ill-defined categories ...

According to Global Climate Models (GCMs) the occurrence of extreme events of precipitation will be more frequent in the future. Therefore, important challenges arise regarding climate variability, which are mainly related to the understanding of ecosystem responses to changes in precipitation patterns. Previous studies have found that Above-ground Net Primary Productivity (ANPP) was positively...

The influence of large scale circulation, represented by the first three rotated EOFs and their associated PCs of wintertime mean sea level pressure, on winter maximum daily precipitation over the North America during 1948-1998 has been investigated. The observed relationship between the circulation and the extreme precipitation is then used to derive projected changes in extreme precipitation ...

An improved independent precipitation data set with the horizontal resolution of 7×7 km grid over central Europe was generated (Free University of Berlin (FUB)precipitation analysis). For scale dependent evaluation of the Local model (LM) of the German Weather service, the precipitation data were separated into convective and stratiform fractions. To analyse precipitation amounts an interpolati...

Quantitative estimates of precipitation in a typical undisturbed trade wind region are derived from 2 months of radar reflectivity data and compared to the meteorological environment determined from soundings, surface flux, and airborne-lidar data. Shallow precipitation was ubiquitous, covering on average about 2% of the region and contributing to at least half of the total precipitation. Echo ...