General circulation models (GCMs), used to predict rainfall at a seasonal lead-time, tend to simulate too many rainfall events of too low intensity relative to individual stations within a GCM grid cell. Even if bias in total rainfall is corrected relative to a target location, this distortion of frequency and intensity is expected to adversely affect simulations of crop growth and yield. We pr...

Rainfall erosivity, considering rainfall amount and intensity, is an important parameter for soil erosion risk assessment under future land use and climate change. Despite its importance, rainfall erosivity is usually implemented in models with a low spatial and temporal resolution. The purpose of this study is to assess the temporaland spatial distribution of rainfall erosivity in form of the ...

Under conditions of high vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and soil drying, restricting transpiration is an important avenue to gain efficiency in water use. The question we raise in this article is whether breeding for agro-ecological environments that differ for the rainfall have selected for traits that control plant water use. These are measured in pearl millet materials bred for zones varying i...

Quantifying rainfall at spatial and temporal scales in regions where meteorological stations are scarce is important for agriculture, natural resource management and land-atmosphere interactions science. We describe a new approach to reconstruct daily rainfall from rain gauge data and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) based on the fact that both signals are periodic and proporti...

this study investigates the atmospheric circulation associated with extreme rainfall events over the coastal west africa. the rainfall data of this study were obtained from the global precipitation climatology centre (gpcc), spanning from 1981 to 2010. the atmospheric datasets were also obtained from the era-interim reanalysis. the study employed the z-index to categorize dry and wet years into...

The simulations of summertime diurnal cycle of precipitation and low-level winds by the Community Atmosphere Model, version 5, are evaluated over subtropical East Asia. The evaluation reveals the physical cause of the observed diurnal rainfall variation in East Asia and points to the source of model strengths and weaknesses. Two model versions with horizontal resolutions of 2.88 and 0.58 are us...

Underestimated rainfall over Amazonia was a common problem for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) models. We investigate whether it still exists in the CMIP phase 5 (CMIP5) models and, if so, what causes these biases? Our evaluation of historical simulations shows that some models still underestimate rainfall over Amazonia. During the dry season, both convective and large...

T he growth of urban population, combined with an increase of extreme events due to climate changes call for a better understanding and representation of urban floods. Rainfall and infiltration are two important factors that affect the watershed response to a given precipitation event. In this paper, we evaluate the influence of the representation of infiltration and spatially variable rainfall...

[1] This work quantifies and explains the direct physical effects of slope angle on infiltration and runoff generation by extending the Green-Ampt equation onto sloping surfaces. A new extended solution using identical precipitation hydrographs was compared to the original formulation and then used to calculate the infiltration and runoff generation for different slope angles but for identical ...

Stemflow, a precipitation and solute supply to soils near tree stems, can play a wide array of roles in ecosystem functioning. However, stemflow's ecohydrological functions have been primarily studied in forests with voluminous stemflow because resource subsidy is currently considered stemflow's only impact on near-stem soils. This common assumption ignores controls that stemflow generation may...