Variability in flow as a result of seasonal precipitation patterns is a defining element of streams and rivers in Mediterranean-climate regions of the world and strongly influences the biota of these unique systems. Mediterranean-climate areas include the Mediterranean Basin and parts of Australia, California, Chile, and South Africa. Mediterranean streams and rivers can experience wet winters ...

Desert species respond strongly to infrequent, intense pulses of precipitation. Consequently, indigenous flora has developed a rich repertoire of life-history strategies to deal with fluctuations in resource availability. Examinations of how future climate change will affect the biota often forecast negative impacts, but these-usually correlative-approaches overlook precipitation variation beca...

Daily precipitation data from worldwide stations and gridded analyses and from 18 coupled global climate models are used to evaluate the models’ performance in simulating the precipitation frequency, intensity, and the number of rainy days contributing to most (i.e., 67%) of the annual precipitation total. Although the models examined here are able to simulate the land precipitation amount well...

[1] Assessing the sensitivity of annual streamflow to precipitation is challenging due to the complexity of the processes that control the water balance. A low-dimensional model can be useful to interrogate data in regional assessments of a large number of catchments, and can provide insights into the broad similarities and differences between catchments’ behaviors. This work assesses the sensi...

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...

Longer, drier summers projected for arid and semi-arid regions of western North America under climate change are likely to have enormous consequences for water resources and river-dependent ecosystems. Many climate change scenarios for this region involve decreases in mean annual streamflow, latesummer precipitation and late-summer streamflow in the coming decades. Intermittent streams are alre...

today, climate change is one of the most important scientific and even the political – social issues. the causes of climate change can be divided into natural and human - made. natural factors have the long-term performance and long history, such as the cycle of solar activity, dusts and gases of volcanic eruptions, geodetic and static agents and etc. human-made factors was mainly formed and ac...