A Poisson regression between the observed climatology of tropical cyclogenesis (TCG) and largescale climate variables is used to construct a TCG index. The regression methodology is objective and provides a framework for the selection of the climate variables in the index. Broadly following earlier work, four climate variables appear in the index: low-level absolute vorticity, relative humidity...

[1] The moisture transport integrated over the depth of the atmosphere (0) is estimated over oceans using satellite data. The transport is the product of the precipitable water and an equivalent velocity (ue), which, by definition, is the depth-averaged wind velocity weighted by humidity. An artificial neural network is employed to construct a relation between the surface wind velocity measured...

We are using a method to at least partially identify the impact of land-use changes by computing the difference between the trends of the surface temperature observations (which reflect all the sources of climate forcing, including surface effects) and the NCEPNCAR Reanalysis estimated surface temperatures (with trends only influenced by the assimilated atmospheric temperature trends). This dif...

Humidity is one of important environmental parameters, which refers to the water vapor content in the air. As one of the fundamental abiotic factors, humidity determines an environment where animals and plants can thrive, also influences the human life. There are three items commonly used to describe humidity, which are absolute humidity (AH), relative humidity (RH) and specific humidity (SH) [...

Ocean reanalysis provides a temporally continuous and spatially gridded four-dimensional estimate of the ocean state for a better understanding of the ocean dynamics and its spatial/temporal variability. Here we present a 19-year (1992-2010) high-resolution ocean reanalysis dataset of the upper ocean in the South China Sea (SCS) produced from an ocean data assimilation system. A wide variety of...

Radiosonde humidity records represent the only in situ observations of tropospheric water vapor content with multidecadal length and quasi-global coverage. However, their use has been hampered by ubiquitous and large discontinuities resulting from changes to instrumentation and observing practices. Here a new approach is developed to homogenize historical records of tropospheric (up to 100 hPa)...

[1] Four different wind products are evaluated in terms of their application to ENSO prediction. These wind products have been used to initialize an intermediate oceanatmosphere coupled model for monthly retrospective forecasts from 1980 to 2002. The wind product that includes satellite scatterometer data has the highest scores, with the NCEP reanalysis and the new FSU objective analysis closel...

Synoptic situations producing rainfall at four rawinsonde observatories at eastern Spain are classified as stratiform or convective depending on dynamic and thermodynamic instability indices. Two daily radiosonde and daily-accumulated precipitation data from four observatories in Eastern Spain are used: Madrid-Barajas (MB), Murcia (MU), Palma de Mallorca (PA) and Zaragoza (ZA). We calculated tw...