The Moravian floods in July 1997 have killed 49 people, affected 536 settlements, 29 000 houses and cost over 2.5 billion USD. A question arises whether the hydrological event (or the preceding meteorological one) can be predicted. In order to foresee the magnitude of catastrophic events we extrapolate historical data which has an impact on the construction in the vicinity of the rivers, insura...

Agro-meteorological quantities are often in the form of time series, and knowledge about their temporal scaling properties is fundamental for transferring locally measured fluctuations to larger scales and vice versa. However, the scaling analysis of these quantities is complicated due to the presence of localized trends and nonstationarities. The objective of this study was to characterise sca...

BACKGROUND In the tropics, rainfall data are seldom accurately recorded, and are often discontinuous in time. In the scope of plague-research in northeast Tanzania, we adapted previous research to reconstruct rainfall patterns at a suitable resolution (1 km), based on time series of NDVI: more accurate satellite imagery was used, in the form of MODIS NDVI, and rainfall data were collected from ...

The arid and semiarid region in central Asia is sensitive and vulnerable to climate variations. However, the sparse and highly unevenly distributed meteorological stations in the region provide limited data for understanding of the region’s climate variations. In this study, the near-surface air temperature change in central Asia from 1979 to 2011 was examined using observations from 81 meteoro...

A new technique was recently developed to study seasonal cycles of climatic trends of expected values, variance, skewness, and other statistical moments of climatic variables. Here we apply that technique to analyze the diurnal and seasonal cycles of trends of surface air temperature and its variability using hourly observations from nine geographically distributed meteorological stations in th...

Water resources provided by alpine glaciers are an important pillar for people in the arid regions of west China. In this study, the Hydrologiska Byrans Vattenavdelning (HBV) light model was applied to simulate glacier mass balance (GMB) and runoff in the Koxkar River Basin (KRB) on the south slope of Mount Tumur, in the western Tianshan Mountains. Daily temperature and precipitation were calcu...

Satellite-based temperature measurements are an important indicator for global climate change studies over large areas. Records from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and (Advanced) Along Track Scanning Radiometer ((A)ATSR) are providing long-term time series information. Assessing the quality of remote sensing-based temperat...