Aridity is generally defined as the ‘degree to which a climate lacks moisture to sustain life in terrestrial ecosystems’. Several recent studies using the ‘aridity index’ (the ratio of potential evaporation to precipitation), have concluded that aridity will increase with CO2 because of increasing temperature. However, the ‘aridity index’ is—counterintuitively—not a direct measure of aridity pe...

Increased forest fire activity across the western continental United States (US) in recent decades has likely been enabled by a number of factors, including the legacy of fire suppression and human settlement, natural climate variability, and human-caused climate change. We use modeled climate projections to estimate the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to observed increases in eigh...

In the purview of global warming, the present study attempts to project changes in climate and quantify the changes in aridity of two coastal districts in south India under the RCP 4.5 trajectory. Projected climate change output generated by RegCM 4.4 model, pertaining to 14 grid points located within the study area, was analyzed and processed for this purpose. The meteorological parameters tem...

The report released by the Intergovernmental Committee for Climate Change indicates that Romania ranks among the top seven countries in Europe that would be strongly impacted by aridity in the next few years, with climate changes consisting in a rise of average annual temperatures by as much as 5°C. The research work was conducted in the South of the Oltenia South-Western Development Region, wh...

the present study illustrates the long-term changes in selected socioeconomic variables (population,industrial activities, settlement dispersion, and land-use) together with climate aridity trends in thriasio, the larger industrial area of greece located twenty kilometers far from athens. this region, originally devoted to agriculture, experienced fast industrial and economic development during...

Available energy (often expressed in terms of potential evaporation) and precipitation largely determine annual evapotranspiration and runoff rates in a region. The ratio of annual potential evaporation to precipitation, referred to as the aridity index by Budyko, has been shown to describe the evaporation ratio (the ratio of annual evapotranspiration to precipitation) of catchments from a rang...

Soil bacteria and fungi play key roles in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, yet our understanding of their responses to climate change lags significantly behind that of other organisms. This gap in our understanding is particularly true for drylands, which occupy ∼41% of Earth´s surface, because no global, systematic assessments of the joint diversity of soil bacteria and fungi have be...

Wildfires play a determining role in the composition and structure of many plant and animal communities. On the other hand, climate change is considered to be a major driver of current and future fire regime changes. Despite increases in drought in many areas of the world, the effects of aridity on post-fire colonization by animals have been rarely addressed. This study aims to analyse how a re...

The western United States is experiencing a severe multiyear drought that is unprecedented in some hydroclimatic records. Using gridded drought reconstructions that cover most of the western United States over the past 1200 years, we show that this drought pales in comparison to an earlier period of elevated aridity and epic drought in AD 900 to 1300, an interval broadly consistent with the Med...

the present study illustrates the long-term changes in selected socioeconomic variables (population,industrial activities, settlement dispersion, and land-use) together with climate aridity trends in thriasio, the larger industrial area of greece located twenty kilometers far from athens. this region, originally devoted to agriculture, experienced fast industrial and economic development during...