[1] A Rossby wave breaking identification method is presented which searches for overturning of absolute vorticity contours on pressure surfaces. The results are compared to those from an analysis of isentropic potential vorticity, and it is demonstrated that both yield similar wave breaking distributions. As absolute vorticity is easily obtained from most model output, we present wave breaking...

INTRODUCTION Plant volatiles (PVOCs) are important targets for studies in natural products, chemotaxonomy and biochemical ecology. The complexity of PVOC profiles often limits research to studies targeting only easily identified compounds. With the availability of mass spectral libraries and recent growth of retention index (RI) libraries, PVOC identification can be achieved using only gas chro...

Discerning the processes influencing geographical patterns of species richness remains one of the central goals of modern ecology. Traditional approaches to exploring these patterns have focused on environmental and ecological correlates of observed species richness. Recently, some have suggested these approaches suffer from the lack of an appropriate null model that accounts for species ranges...

Climate change information is essential for water resources management planning, and the majority of research available uses the global circulation model (GCM) data to project future water balance. Despite the fact that the results of various GCMs are still heterogeneous, it is common to utilize GCM values directly in climate change impact assessment models. To mitigate these limitations, this ...

During the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), Western North America experienced episodes of intense aridity that persisted for multiple decades or longer. These megadroughts are well documented in many proxy records, but the causal mechanisms are poorly understood. General circulation models (GCMs) simulate megadroughts, but do not reproduce the temporal clustering of events during the MCA, sugges...

Many features of the general circulation of the atmosphere shift upward in response to warming in simulations of climate change with both general circulation models (GCMs) and cloud-system-resolving models. The importance of the upward shift is well known, but its physical basis and the extent to which it occurs coherently across variables are not well understood. A transformation is derived he...

The main source of information on future climate conditions are global circulation models (GCMs). While the various GCMs agree on an increase of surface temperature, the predictions for precipitation exhibit high spread among the models, especially in shorter-than-daily temporal resolution. This paper presents a method to predict regional distributions of the hourly rainfall depth based on dail...

[1] The water cycle of the southwestern United States (SW) is dominated by winter storms that maintain a positive annual net precipitation. Analysis of the control and future climate from four pairs of regional and global climate models (RCMs and GCMs) shows that the RCMs simulate a higher fraction of transient eddy moisture fluxes because the hydrodynamic instabilities associated with flow ove...