A combination of satellite data, reanalysis products and climate models are combined to monitor changes in water vapour, clear-sky radiative cooling of the atmosphere and precipitation over the period 1979-2006. Climate models are able to simulate observed increases in column integrated water vapour (CWV) with surface temperature (Ts) over the ocean. Changes in the observing system lead to spur...

The occurrences of silica deposits (quartz veins, silica sinters, silica scales) suggest that precipitation via nucleation and overgrowth on pre-existing mineral surfaces occurs under crustal conditions. We conducted hydrothermal flow-through experiments on silica precipitation using no mineral substrate at 120–430 °C and 31 MPa for understanding the effects of the aluminum on the mineralogy an...

Measurements of the solubility of calf-skin tropocollagen in neutral phosphate buffers in the temperature range 20-37 degrees C show that native collagen fibril formation is an endothermic process made thermodynamically favourable by a large positive entropy of precipitation associated with structural changes in the surrounding solvent. The effect of inorganic ions and small solute molecules on...

Historical records of precipitation, streamflow and drought indices all show increased aridity since 1950 over many land areas1,2. Analyses of model-simulated soil moisture3,4, drought indices1,5,6 and precipitation-minus-evaporation7 suggest increased risk of drought in the twenty-first century. There are, however, large differences in the observed and modelsimulated drying patterns1,2,6. Reco...

Two aspects of global climate change are particularly relevant to river and coastal flooding: changes in extreme precipitation and changes in sea level. In this paper we summarize the relevant findings of the IPCC Third Assessment Report and illustrate some of the common results found by the current generation of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs), using the Hadley Cen...

In the Pacific Northwest, warming climate has resulted in a lengthened growing season, declining snowpack, and earlier timing of spring runoff. This study characterizes the impact of climate change in two basins in Idaho, the Spokane River and the Boise River Basins. We simulated the basin scale hydrology by coupling the downscaled precipitation and temperature outputs from a suite of global cl...

The sensitivity of quantitative precipitation forecasts to various modifications of the Kain-Fritsch (KF) convective parameterization scheme (CPS) is examined for twenty selected cases characterized by intense convective activity and widespread precipitation over Greece, during the warm period of 2005–2007. The study is conducted using the MM5 model with a two nested domains strategy, with hori...

This study integrates a Box-Cox power transformation procedure into a common trend two-phase regression model based test (the PMFred algorithm) for detecting changepoints, to make the test applicable to non-Gaussian data series, such as non-zero daily precipitation amounts or wind speeds. The detection power aspects of the transformed method (transPMFred) are assessed by a simulation study, whi...

Recent global climate model simulations for the IPCC Fourth Assessment report show a realistic North Pacific storm track and Aleutian Low for the present-day climate conditions. Under climate change, the storm track and Aleutian Low move northward and intensify. These changes shift precipitation northward along the Pacific coast of North America. In particular, precipitation is intensified over...

Changes in precipitation amount and variability have the potential to alter the structure and function of grasslands, but we know little about how changes in the timing of precipitation might aff ect grasslands. Here, we analyze long-term records from a tallgrass prairie to show that shifts in the timing of precipitation during the growing season have little eff ect on primary productivity or g...