Climatic controls on fluvial landscapes are commonly characterized in terms of mean annual precipitation. However, physical erosion processes are driven by extreme events and are therefore more directly related to the intensity, duration, and frequency of individual rainfall events. Climate also influences erosional processes indirectly by controlling vegetation. In this study, we explore how i...

Hydrological processes depend directly on climate conditions [e.g., precipitation, potential evapotranspiration (PE)] based on the water balance. This paper examines streamflow datasets at four hydrological stations and meteorological observations at 79 weather stations to reveal the streamflow changes and underlying drivers in four typical watersheds (Meigang, Saitang, Gaosha, and Xiashan) wit...

East African precipitation is characterized by a dry annual mean climatology compared to other deep tropical land areas and a bimodal annual cycle with the major rainy season during March–May (MAM; often called the ‘‘long rains’’) and the second during October–December (OND; often called the ‘‘short rains’’). To explore these distinctive features, ERA-Interim data are used to analyze the associ...

Global models projected that, precipitation in Great Plains of the United States will decrease in summer and increase in spring and winter. However, few studies had carefully examined ecosystem responses to this intra-annual redistribution of precipitation. Here we used a process-based model, Terrestrial ECOsystem (TECO) Model, to evaluate responses of ecosystem carbon processes (including net ...

The spatial and temporal variability of precipitation time series were investigated for the Hexi Corridor, in Northwest China, by analyzing the entropy information. The examinations were performed on monthly, seasonal, and annual timescales based on 29 meteorological stations for the period of 1961–2015. The apportionment entropy and intensity entropy were used to analyze the regional precipita...

Orbital precession changes the seasonal distribution of insolation at a given latitude but not the annual mean. Hence, the correlation of paleoclimate proxies of annual-mean precipitation with orbital precession implies a nonlinear rectification in the precipitation response to seasonal solar forcing. It has previously been suggested that the relevant nonlinearity is that of the Clausius–Clapey...

Effective mean annual precipitation is related to sediment yield from drainage basins throughout the climatic regions of the United States. Sediment yield is a maximum at about 10 to 14 inches of precipitation, decreasing sharply on both sides of this maximum in one case owing to a deficiency of runoff and in the other to increased density of vegetation. Data are presented illustrating the incr...

The ‘rain use efficiency’ (RUE) may be defined as the ratio of above-ground net primary productivity (ANPP) to annual precipitation, and it is claimed to be a conservative property of the vegetation cover in drylands, if the vegetation cover is not subject to non-precipitation related land degradation. Consequently, RUE may be regarded as means of normalizing ANPP for the impact of annual preci...