Rainfall and its associated storm water runoff have been associated with transport of many pollutants into beach water. Fecal material, from a variety of animals (humans, pets, livestock, and wildlife), can wash into beach water following rainfall and result in microbial contamination of the beach. Many locales around the world issue pre-emptive beach closures associated with rainfall. This stu...

In this paper we use farmers' actual experiences with changes in rainfall levels and theirresponses to these changes to assess if patterns of fertilizer use are responsive tochanges in rainfall patterns. Using plot and farm level panel data from the centralHighlands of Ethiopia matched with corresponding village level rainfall data; resultsshow that both the current year’s d...

The characteristics of rainfall-runoff are important aspects of hydrological processes. In this study, rainfall-runoff processes and soil moisture dynamics at different soil depths and slope positions of grassland with two different row spacings (5 cm and 10 cm, respectively, referred to as R5 and R10) were analyzed, by means of a solution of rainfall simulation experiments. Bare land was also ...

[1] Numerous studies have documented the effect of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on rainfall in many regions of the globe. The question of whether ENSO is the single most important factor in interannual rainfall variability has received less attention, mostly because the kind of data that would be required to make such an assessment were simply not available. Until 1979 the evidence linki...

It is widely recognised that the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) in south-eastern Australia has been in the grip of a serious drought for many years. Over the period 1997−2006, mean annual rainfall has been approximately 16 percent lower than the long-term (1895−2006) average across the MDB. Runoff has been 39 percent lower over the same period. The continuing drought in the MDB has brought the need...

Although the potential for increased temperature is the primary and best-studied aspect of anthropogenic climate change, altered rainfall patterns, increased storm intensity, and more severe droughts are also predicted in most climate-change scenarios. We altered experimentally the rainfall regime in a native tallgrass prairie in northeastern Kansas and assessed leaf-level physiological activit...

This study evaluated the accuracy of several models for estimating daily solar radiation (Q) across Australia. Data from 39 sites were taken from MetAccess. The sites were grouped into four climatic zones. Coefficients of nine models, including two newly developed formulae, were fitted for the 39 sites. Correlation coefficients (R2) between estimated Q and measured Q and root mean squared error...

Precipitation and temperature drive many aspects of terrestrial ecosystem function. Climate change scenarios predict increasing precipitation variability and temperature, and long term experiments are required to evaluate the ecosystem consequences of interannual climate variation, increased growing season (intra-annual) rainfall variability, and warming. We present results from an experiment a...

Error characterization is vital for the advancement of precipitation algorithms, the evaluation of numerical model outputs, and their integration in various hydro-meteorological applications. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) has been a benchmark for successive Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) based products. This has given way to...

The effect of hygroscopic seeding on warm rain clouds was examined using a hybrid cloud microphysical model combining a Lagrangian Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) activation model, a semi-Lagrangian droplet growth model, and an Eulerian spatial model for advection and sedimentation of droplets. This hybrid cloud microphysical model accurately estimated the effects of CCN on cloud microstructure...