Climate has always been changing during the lifetime of the earth, and has appeared in the form of the ice age, hurricanes, severe and sudden temperature changes, precipitation and other climatic elements, and has dramatically influenced the environment, and in some cases has caused severe changes and even destructions. Some of the most important aspects of climate changes can be found in preci...

The circulation of water through the Earth system is of critical importance to life on Earth. The hydrological cycle is also intimately linked to the energy cycle and to biogeochemical processes including the carbon cycle. Simulating the various processes that interact to form the hydrological cycle is a daunting task for climate models. In particular, over land, interactions between precipitat...

Phenology response to climatic variables is a vital indicator for understanding changes in biosphere processes as related to possible climate change. We investigated global phenology relationships to precipitation and land surface temperature (LST) at high spatial and temporal resolution for calendar years 2008–2011. We used cross-correlation between MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), MODIS...

Environmental change in terms of land use and climatic changes are posing a serious threat to species distributions and extinctions. Thus in order to predict and mitigate against the effects of environmental change both drivers should be accounted for. Two endemic plant species in the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, Crocus cyprius and Ophrys kotschyi, were used as a case study. We have coupled ...

Secular trends of daily precipitation characteristics are considered in the transient climate change experiment with a coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model ECHAM4/OPYC3 for 1900–2099. The climate forcing is due to increasing concentrations of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Mean daily precipitation, precipitation intensity, probability of wet days and parameters of the gam...

How do the continents affect large-scale hydrological cycles? How important can one continent be to the climate system? To address these questions, five years of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) observations, Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) observations, and the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (G...

This paper aims at evaluating the impacts of climate change on land use patterns in Brazil. To this purpose, we specify and estimate an econometric land use model to assess how climate variables affect land allocation decisions according to three types of use: cropland, pasture and forestland. Based on the econometric model estimates, we then simulate how farmers will adapt their land use choic...

From winter 2009 to spring 2010, due to decreasing precipitation and high temperature, Southwest China experienced the worst meteorological drought in 60 years. The drought has impacted large areas of Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi and Sichuan provinces. In this paper, climate data (precipitation and temperature) and SPOT VGT Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data were combined with land ...