In a modeling study we examine vulnerability of income from mobile (transhumant) pastoralism and sedentary pastoralism to reduced mean annual precipitation (MAP) and droughts. The study is based on empirical data of a 3410 km research region in southern, semi-arid Morocco. The land use decision model integrates a meta-model of the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) simulator to depi...

Floods and droughts are important features of most running water ecosystems, but the alteration of natural flow regimes by recent human activities, such as dam building, raises questions related to both evolution and conservation. Among organisms inhabiting running waters, what adaptations exist for surviving floods and droughts? How will the alteration of the frequency, timing and duration of ...

Reliable drought monitoring requires long-term and continuous precipitation data. High resolution satellite measurements provide valuable precipitation information on a quasi-global scale. However, their short lengths of records limit their applications in drought monitoring. In addition to this limitation, long-term low resolution satellite-based gauge-adjusted data sets such as the Global Pre...

In less than 15 years, the Amazon region experienced three major droughts. Links between droughts and fires have been demonstrated for the 1997/1998, 2005, and 2010 droughts. In 2010, emissions of 510 ± 120 Tg C were associated to fire alone in Amazonia. Existing approaches have, however, not yet disentangled the proportional contribution of multiple land cover sources to this total. We develop...

A statistical approach is used to explore the variability of precipitation and meteorological drought in Mexico’s Rı́o Yaqui basin on seasonal-to-decadal timescales. For this purpose, a number of custom datasets have been developed, including a monthly 1900-2004 precipitation index for the Yaqui basin created by merging two gridded land-surface precipitation products, a 350-year tree-ring based ...

Droughts in the Southern Great Plains (SGP) have been attributed to the cold phase of El Niño–Southern Oscillation or La Niña. While La Niña events have been clearly linked to winter droughts, their link to summer droughts has remained unclear. We analyze the difference in precipitation between dry and nondry summers over the SGP during La Niña years. Anomalously high geopotential height and su...

Shimada, I., Schaaf, C. B., Thompson, L. G. and Mosley-Thompson, E. Cultural impacts of severe droughts in the prehistoric Andes: application of a 1,500-year icecore precipitation record Late in the sixth century, Andean peoples experienced major cultural upheavals, including a notablesettlement shift of the classic Mochica culture on the northern Peruvian coast. A recently established<...

Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) experiences a recurrent drought phenomenon. However, few studies have focused on drought monitoring in this region due to lack of ground observations. The newly released Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS) with a long-term record and high resolution has a great potential for drought monitoring. Based on the assessment of CHIRPS for ca...