Changes in regional water availability belong to the most crucial potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change, but are highly uncertain. It is thus of key importance for stakeholders to assess the possible implications of different global temperature thresholds on these quantities. Using a subset of climate model simulations from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Projec...

Understanding how predicted species responses to climate change are affected by advances in climate modeling is important for determining the frequency with which vulnerability assessments need to be updated. We used ecological niche models to compare predicted climatic habitat suitability for 132 species of reptiles and amphibians in California, USA under the previous and current generations o...

Seasonality and interannual variability in North American photosynthetic activity reflect potential patterns of climate variability. We simulate 24 yr (1983–2006) and evaluate regional and seasonal contribution to annual mean gross primary productivity (GPP) as well as its interannual variability. The highest productivity occurs in Mexico, the southeast United States and the Pacific Northwest. ...

We measured bulk δC and δN values and carbon and nitrogen elemental concentrations of leaves collected from Metasequoia glyptostroboides Hu et Cheng trees cultivated at 39 sites across the United States under different latitudes and climatic regions. δD values from south-facing leaf n-alkanes of 27 trees were also determined. Climate data over the past 50 years (1950–2009) were compiled from st...

Climate change is a phenomenon has been based on the available evidence from a very long time ago and now its existence is very probable. The speed and nature of climate parameters changes at the middle of twentieth century has been different and its quickness more than the before and its trend changed to some extent comparing to the past. Climate change issue now regarded as not only one of th...

We develop a framework that casts the point water-vegetation dynamics under stochastic rainfall forcing as a continuous-time random walk (CTRW), which yields an evolution equation for the joint probability density function (PDF) of soil-moisture and biomass. We find regime shifts in the steady-state PDF as a consequence of changes in the rainfall structure, which flips the relative strengths of...

introduction selection of the clear and transparent index for the precipitation using long-term homogeneous data is an important point for the researchers. several investigations have led to different indices for heavy rainfall. in some cases the specific amount of precipitation was used for heavy rainfall (rahimzadeh, 2005; masoodian, 2008; kamiguchi et al., 2006), e.g. alijani (2002) has sugg...

In this paper we examined whether the recorded precipitation changes cause erosion in Naxos Island, Greece using precipitation indices derived from daily precipitation totals, during the period 1955–2007, in order to develop an erosion risk model. Although the mean annual precipitation appear to be low (∼360.0 mm), the erosion processes of the area are very intense, because of the intensive cha...

Temperature and precipitation extremes and their potential future changes are evaluated in an ensemble of global coupled climate models participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) diagnostic exercise for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Climate extremes are expressed in terms of 20-yr return values of annual extremes of near-surface temperature and 24-h precipitatio...

Soils with pedogenic carbonate cover about 30% (3.44 10 km) of China, mainly across its arid and semiarid regions in the Northwest. Based on the second national soil survey (1979–1992), total soil inorganic carbon (SIC) storage in China was estimated to be 53.3 6.3 PgC (1 Pg5 10 g) to the depth investigated to 2 m. Soil inorganic carbon storages were 4.6, 10.6, 11.1, and 20.8 Pg for the depth r...