Frequency and severity of droughts were projected to increase in many regions. However, their effects of temporal dynamics on the terrestrial carbon cycle remain uncertain, and hence deserve further investigation. In this paper, the droughts that occurred in China during 2001-2010 were identified by using the standardized precipitation index (SPI). Standardized anomaly index (SAI), which has be...

Regional droughts are common in North America, but pan-continental droughts extending across multiple regions, including the 2012 event, are rare relative to single-region events. Here, the tree-ring-derived North American Drought Atlas is used to investigate drought variability in four regions over the last millennium, focusing on pan-continental droughts. During the Medieval Climate Anomaly (...

Amazon forests experienced two severe droughts at the beginning of the 21st century: one in 2005 and the other in 2010. How Amazon forests responded to these droughts is critical for the future of the Earth’s climate system. It is only possible to assess Amazon forests’ response to the droughts in large areal extent through satellite remote sensing. Here, we used the Multi-Angle Implementation ...

The comprehensive assessment of climatic and hydrological droughts in terms of their temporal and spatial evolutions is very important for water resources management and social development in the basin scale. To study the spatial and temporal changes of climatic and hydrological droughts and the relationships between them, the SPEI and SDI are adopted to assess the changes and the correlations ...

Introduction Conclusions References

This paper examines the global effects of droughts on economic activity and the influence of local and upstream large dams on this relationship. We use spatially-specific data on drought severity and nighttime lights data as a measure of economic activity. The analysis shows that severe and extreme droughts reduce local economic activity. In preliminary analyses, local dams appear to improve th...

Based on the national precipitation dataset in the Huang-Huai-Hai River Basin of China for the 1961–2011 period, the China-Z growing season index was calculated to analyze the characteristics of the evolution of meteorological droughts. Data from statistical droughts (the droughts which are defined and classified by the actual statistic data) were compared with those of meteorological droughts ...

A dynamically motivated statistical forecasting scheme for eastern Mediterranean winter rainfall is presented. The scheme is based on North Atlantic sea level pressure precursors. The resulting forecasts are robust and statistically significant at ;13 months lead time, and improve at ;7 months lead. It is suggested that these forecasts form a foundation for an operational early-warning system f...