Introduction Conclusions References Tables Figures

[1] The surface water budget of the Amazon River basin derived from the ERA40 reanalysis is evaluated by comparing it with observed precipitation (P), streamflow/runoff (R), and evapotranspiration (ET) data sets for the period of 1980–2002. The rainfall is averaged over 90% of the Amazon River basin, corresponding to the catchments of the Óbidos and Altamira streamflow gauges. The annual rainfa...

We compare predictions of a simple process-based crop model (Soltani and Sinclair 2012), a simple statistical model (Schlenker and Roberts 2009), and a combination of both models to actual maize yields on a large, representative sample of farmer-managed fields in the Corn Belt region of the United States. After statistical post-model calibration, the process model (Simple Simulation Model, or S...

Representation of the hydrological interaction between the land surface and the atmosphere requires considerable improvement, particularly for predicting evapotranspiration feedbacks for use in models of the general circulation (GCMs) of the atmosphere. The predictive model developed here attempts to use a water balance approach that extracts information from the masses of catchment-scale time ...

The millions of plant specimens that have been collected and stored in Chinese herbaria over the past ~110 years have recently been digitized and geo-referenced. Here we use this unique collection data set for species distribution modeling exercise aiming at mapping &explaining the botanical richness; delineating China's phytogeographical regions and investigating the environmental drivers of t...

Carbon and water fluxes are key properties of ecosystem processes and functions. A better understanding of their temporal dynamics and coupling mechanism between these fluxes will help us improve ecosystem management for mitigation as well as adaption to future climatic change. From 2003 to 2009, carbon and water flux data were obtained by the eddy covariance method over an old-growth forest in...

The fraction of land area over the Continental United States experiencing extreme hot and dry conditions has been increasing over the past several decades, consistent with expectation from anthropogenic climate change. A clear concurrent change in precipitation, however, has not been confirmed. Vapor pressure deficit (VPD), combining temperature and humidity, is utilized here as an indicator of...

[1] A large-scale geographical study of the ice pack in the seasonal ice zone of the Weddell Sea, Antarctica, took place from September to October 2006. Sea ice brines with a salinity greater than 58 and temperature lower than 3.6 C were sampled from 22 ice stations. The brines had large deficits in total alkalinity and in the concentrations of the major dissolved macronutrients (total dissolve...

Climate change will affect tree species growth and distribution; however, under the same climatic conditions species may differ in their response according to site conditions. We evaluated the climate-driven patterns of growth for six dominant deciduous tree species in the southern Appalachians. We categorized species into two functional groups based on their stomatal regulation and xylem archi...

Fluxes of water, energy and carbon dioxide (CO2) were measured using the eddy covariance technique over a mesquite (Prosopis velutina) woodland along the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona for the entire growing seasons of 2001 and 2002, between the last freeze event of spring and the first of fall. Although the general pattern of ecosystem response to climate forcing was similar in both y...