A scanning, volume-imaging Raman lidar was used in August 1997 to map the water vapor and latent energy flux fields in southern Arizona in support of the (Semi-Arid Land Surface Atmosphere) SALSA program. The SALSA experiment was designed to estimate evapotranspiration over a cottonwood riparian corridor and the adjacent mesquite-grass community. The lidar derived water vapor images showed micr...

Soil moisture influences and is influenced by water, climate, and ecosystem conditions, affecting associated ecosystem services in the landscape. This paper couples snow storage-melting dynamics with an analytical modeling approach to screening basin-scale, long-term soil moisture variability and change in a changing climate. This coupling enables assessment of both spatial differences and temp...

Spatial and temporal variability of atmospheric HC1 columns are calculated for January 1979 using a three-dimensional chemistrytransport model designed to provide the best possible representation of stratospheric transport. Large spatial and temporal variability of the HC1 columns is shown to be correlated with lower stratospheric potential vorticity and thus to be of dynamical origin. Systemat...

Often in regionally aggregated spatiotemporal models, a single variance parameter is used to capture variability in the spatial structure of the model, ignoring the impact that spatially-varying factors may have on the variability in the underlying process. We extend existing methodologies to allow for region-specific variance components in our analysis of monthly asthma hospitalization rates i...

[1] We combine Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR), tide gauge, and continuous GPS measurements to determine the spatial variation in vertical land motion (VLM) along the coast of the Los Angeles basin over the past decade, and to examine the impact of spatially variable VLM on relative sea level trends. By identifying radar scattering targets with long-term coherence we make height...

The ratio of leaf area to ground area (leaf area index, LAI) is an important state variable in ecosystem studies since it influences fluxes of matter and energy between the land surface and the atmosphere. As a basis for generating temporally continuous and spatially distributed datasets of LAI, the current study contributes an analysis of its spatial variability and spatial structure. Soil-veg...

Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) provides a conceptually simple and robust method to evaluate the system reliability of slope stability, particularly in spatially variable soils. However, it suffers from a lack of efficiency at small probability levels, which are of great interest in geotechnical design practice. To address this problem, this paper develops a MCS-based approach for efficient evalua...

Drought monitoring is a fundamental component of drought risk management. It is normally performed usingvarious drought indices that are effectively continuous functions of rainfall and other hydrometeorological variables.In many instances, drought indices are used for monitoring purposes. Geostatistical methods allow the interpolationof spatially referenced data and the prediction of values fo...

Surface waters are the most important economic resource for humans which provide water for agricultural, industrial and anthropogenic activities. Surface water quality plays vital role in protecting aquatic ecosystems. Unplanned urbanization, intense agricultural activities and deforestation are positively associated with carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous related water quality parameters. Multip...

Seismic waves are filtered as they pass through soil layers, from bedrock to surface. Frequencies and amplitudes of the response wave are affected due to this filtration effect and this will result in different ground motion characteristics. Therefore, it is important to consider the impact of the soil properties on the evaluation of earthquake ground motions for the design of structures. Soil ...