Aims Variation in precipitation strongly influences plant growth, species distributions and genetic diversity. Intraspecific variation in phenotypic plasticity, the ability of a genotype to alter its growth, morphology or physiology in response to the environment, could influence species responses to changing precipitation and climate change. Despite this, the patterns and mechanisms of intrasp...

Attaining accurate precipitation data is critical to understanding land surface processes and global climate change. The development of satellite sensors and remote sensing technology has resulted in multi-source precipitation datasets that provide reliable estimates of precipitation over un-gauged areas. However, gaps exist over high latitude areas due to the limited spatial extent of several ...

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...

Abstract SSM/I has been applied in derivation of liquid water and precipitation for many years. Due to the uncertainty in variance of surface emissivity and characters of precipitation, the comparison of rainfall retrieval with ground truth remains a controversial issue. In order to investigate this issue, data set for precipitation from stratus clouds over ocean area were collected for 5 years...

The impact of the circulation shift under climate warming on the distribution of precipitation extremes and the associated sensitivity to model resolution are investigated using Community Atmosphere Model Version 3.0 in an aquaplanet configuration. The response of the probability density function of the precipitation to a uniform sea surface temperature warming can be interpreted as superimposi...

Extreme precipitation events are predicted to occur more frequently and will have significant influences on terrestrial ecosystem carbon (C) cycling in the future. However, response patterns of soil respiration to precipitation changes remain uncertain in terrestrial ecosystems. A field experiment with seven precipitation treatments (i.e. from -60% to +60% of ambient precipitation to form a dro...

This study provides insight into how CMIP5 climate models perform in simulating summer and winter precipitation at different geographical locations and climate conditions. Precipitation biases in the CMIP5 historical (1901 to 2005) simulations relative to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) observations are evaluated over 8 regions exhibiting distinct seasonal hydroclimates: moist tropical (Amazon...

Global precipitation data sets with high spatial and temporal resolution are needed for many applications, but they were unavailable before the recent creation of several such satellite products. Here, we evaluate four different satellite data sets of hourly or 3-hourly precipitation (namely CMORPH, PERSIANN, TRMM 3B42 and a microwave-only product referred to as MI) by comparing the spatial pat...

The to equation method based on an equivalent isobaric geopotential height in t• coordinates has been used to retrieve the precipitation over Greenland. This approach is designed to accurately represent the topographic effects of the Greenland Ice Sheet on atmospheric motion and precipitation. The 11 year mean precipitation from 1985 to 1996 over all of Greenland is 376 mm yr -• which is close ...

Although cumulonimbus (Cb) clouds are the main source of precipitation in south China, the relationship between Cb cloud characteristics and precipitation remains unclear. Accordingly, the primary objective of this study was to thoroughly analyze the relationship between Cb cloud features and precipitation both at the pixel and cloud patch scale, and then to apply it in precipitation estimation...