The rapid expansion of deserts in recent decades as a result of human actions combined with climatic disasters has highlighted the necessity to understand biological processes in arid environments. Whereas physical processes and the biology of flora and fauna have been relatively well studied in marginally used arid areas, knowledge of desert soil micro-organisms remains fragmentary. This chapt...

Identification of climatic indices are vital in essence of their ability to characterize different climatic events. We focus on discovery of climatic indices important for Indian summer monsoon from climatic parameters surface pressure and zonal wind velocity. We use climatic network based community detection approach for discovery of climatic indices. New indices depict better correlation with...

Predictive models are constructed to best describe an observed field’s statistics within a given class of nonlinear dynamics driven by a spatially coherent noise that is white in time. For linear dynamics, such inverse stochastic models are obtained by multiple linear regression (MLR). Nonlinear dynamics, when more appropriate, is accommodated by applying multiple polynomial regression (MPR) in...

This contribution provides an overview of the intricacies of mountain climates, particularly as they pertain to the European Alps. Examples will be given of issues that are related to climatic change as observed in the Alps during the course of the 20th century, and some of the physical mechanisms that may be responsible for those changes. The discussion will then focus on the problems related ...

Determining the links between the behavioural and population responses of wild species to environmental variations is critical for understanding the impact of climate variability on ecosystems. Using long-term data sets, we show how large-scale climatic anomalies in the Southern Hemisphere affect the foraging behaviour and population dynamics of a key marine predator, the king penguin. When lar...

[1] Based on the nonlinear techniques for estimation of coupling between oscillatory systems, we investigate the dynamics of climatic modes characterizing global and the Northern Hemisphere (NH) processes. In particular, indices of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) for 1950–2004 are analyzed. The methods based on phase dynamics modeling and nonlinear ‘...

Low-frequency (interannual or longer period) climatic variability is of interest, because of its significance for the understanding and prediction of protracted climatic anomalies. Since precipitation is one of the key variables driving various hydrologic processes, it is useful to examine precipitation records to better understand long-term climate dynamics. Here, we use the multi-taper method...

Destruction and fatalities from recent tornado outbreaks in North America have raised considerable concerns regarding their climatic and geographic variability. However, regional characterization of tornado activity in relation to large-scale climatic processes remains highly uncertain. Here, a novel Bayesian hierarchical framework is developed for elucidating the spatiotemporal variability of ...

We analyzed sediment elemental composition (C, N, P, and Si) and planktonic diatom fossils from the top 32 cm of a short core (55 cm) from Yellowstone Lake (Wyoming), tracking deposition from about 1650 to 1998. Associations between fossil communities and sediment chemistry were measured by rank-order correlation to gauge decadal scale relationships between lake chemistry and phytoplankton comm...