Significant increases in summer precipitation have occurred in the midwestern United States over the last century for reasons that remain unclear. It is postulated that the expansion of irrigation and cropland in the central United States over the past 60 yr has been a major contributor to these observed increases in precipitation. As a first step toward attribution of these precipitation chang...

The approach to illustrate observed changes in heavy precipitation has been repeated for gridded daily precipitation data for the US. Fig.S1a shows the same result as Fig.2b but for the contiguous US east of 100°W, specifically the region between 65° and 100°W and 25° and 49°N with data coverage (see domain in Fig.S5). Note that the period differs somewhat from Fig.2b since only data up to 2006...

[1] The impacts of stratospheric ozone depletion on the extremes of daily precipitation in the austral summer are explored using two global climate models. Both models indicate that stratospheric ozone losses since the late 1970s may have increased the frequency and intensity of very heavy precipitation in austral summer over southern high and subtropical latitudes, and may have decreased the f...

Due to synoptic-climatological reasons as well as a specific configuration of mountain ranges, the northeast part of the Czech Republic is an area with an enhanced influence of low-pressure systems of the Mediterranean origin. They are associated with an upper-level advection of warm and moist air and often lead to heavy precipitation events. Particularities of this area are evaluated using a r...

BACKGROUND The effects of weather on West Nile virus (WNV) mosquito populations in the United States have been widely reported, but few studies assess their overall impact on transmission to humans. OBJECTIVES We investigated meteorologic conditions associated with reported human WNV cases in the United States. METHODS We conducted a case-crossover study to assess 16,298 human WNV cases rep...

The paper studies changes in daily precipitation records at the National Observatory, Athens, during the period 1891–2004. This is the longest available time series of precipitation for Greece. The results show that both the shape and scale parameter of a fitted two parameter gamma distribution for the last two decades do show a significant difference of these parameters, when compared to any p...

Observed intensification of precipitation extremes, responsible for extensive societal impacts, are widely attributed to anthropogenic sources, which may include indirect effects of agricultural irrigation. However quantifying the effects of irrigation on far-downstream climate remains a challenge. We use three paired Community Earth System Model simulations to assess mechanisms of irrigation-i...

Recent flooding and heavy precipitation events in the US and worldwide have caused great damage to crop production. If the frequency of these weather extremes were to increase in the near future, as recent trends for the US indicate and as projected by global climate models (e.g., US National Assessment, Overview Report, 2001, The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, Nation...