Climate models predict shifts in the amount, frequency and seasonality of rainfall. Given close links between grassland productivity and rainfall, such changes are likely to have profound effects on the functioning of grassland ecosystems and modify species interactions. Here, we introduce a unique, new experimental platform - DRI-Grass (Drought and Root Herbivore Interactions in a Grassland) -...

Prognostic equations for the rain mass mixing ratio and the rain drop number concentration are introduced into the large-scale cloud microphysics parameterization of the ECHAM5 general circulation model (ECHAM5-RAIN). For this a rain flux from one level to the next with the appropriate fall speed is introduced. This maintains rain water in 5 the atmosphere to be available for the next time step...

Despite the utilization of several earthquake resistant traditional techniques in Iranian architecture throughout the centuries, the high seismic vulnerability of Iranian vernacular constructions is obvious. One of the latest innovations in building earthquake-proof emergency dwellings, prior to introducing the modern seismic design codes, took place during the successive destructive earthqu...

in responding to emergency events. The assessment of shelters for the 2005 hurri­ cane evacuees is a great example of the use of these skills. Many of the environmental health issues that existed in the shelters were the same as those that practitioners assess during their regular duties. These is­ sues include safe food preparation, safe and adequate supply of water, infection control/ handwas...

Subsequent events seem to indicate that, when President Kennedy, in July of 1961, made his appeal for family fallout shelters, he was not doing so because he thought the shelters would protect a large part of the public from a likely nuclear attack. Rather, it seems, his intent in the shelter program, as in the call-up of reserves that took place at about the same time, was to enhance the credi...

This study examined the rate of admission to public shelters between 1990 and 1992 among persons who received Medicaid-reimbursed inpatient and outpatient psychiatric services and inpatient substance abuse services in Philadelphia between 1985 and 1993. Results show that 7.5 percent of such persons were admitted to public shelters during the three-year period, nearly 2.7 times the rate of shelt...

A rain field reconstruction and downscaling methodology is presented, which allows suitable integration of large scale rainfall information and rain-gauge measurements at the ground. The former data set is assumed to provide probabilistic indicators that are used to infer the parameters of the probability density function of the stochastic rain process at each pixel site. Rain-gauge measurement...

This study evaluated the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Forecast System (GFS) forecast bias in different precipitation (light rain, moderate rain, heavy rain and very heavy rain) by comparing the ground-based observations in three countries. Then the correlations between GFS precipitation forecast errors and the aerosol loading are investigated extensively to examin...

[1] Warm rain occurs in low‐level liquid water clouds and does not involve an ice‐phase process. Comprising many state‐of‐the‐art passive and active instruments, the NASA A‐Train series of satellites provide comprehensive simultaneous information about warm clouds and their precipitation processes. This study exploits multi‐sensor data from the A‐Train satellite constellation to investigate the...

Microwave brightness temperatures are obtained from the SeaWinds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite. These QuikSCAT Radiometer (QRad) measurements are used to infer instantaneous oceanic rain rates using a statistical retrieval algorithm that is based upon collocated TMI measurements. QRad instantaneous rain rate measurements have been binned in 0.5 hour local time windows onto a 0.5° x 0....