We examined changes in several independent intensity indices of four major tropical monsoonal circulations for the period 1950–1998. These intensity indices included observed land surface precipitation and observed ocean surface pressure in the monsoon regions as well as upperlevel divergence calculated at several standard levels from the NCAR/NCEP reanalysis. These values were averaged seasona...

In recent decades, urbanization has become a significant urban environmental and ecological concern, especially in most developing countries. In China, rapid urban sprawl has had a profound influence on runoff and results in larger and more frequent incidents of flooding in many urban areas. Therefore, evaluating the impacts of urbanization on runoff is of great important for urban planning pol...

Of all recurring natural disasters, long-term drought is one of the most devastating and costly due to large spatial extent and often long duration. The mechanisms responsible for the maintenance of long-term droughts are not well understood, however many drought analyses allege the importance of land-atmosphere feedbacks and speculate that these feedbacks will amplify changes in the hydrologic...

A methodology is developed to relate urban growth studies to distributed hydrological modeling using an integrated approach of remote sensing and GIS. This linkage is possible because both studies share land-use and land-cover data. Landsat Thematic Mapper data are utilized to detect urban land-cover changes. GIS analyses are then conducted to examine the changing spatial patterns of urban grow...

The arid zone catchments of the Lake Eyre Basin (LEB, area of 1.2*10km) in central Australia have unregulated, highly variable flow regimes and contain a paucity of gauging stations. In developing hydrological models of these catchments, only limited gauging station data are available for identifying the broad landscape differences influencing runoff and streamflow. The catchments have been div...

A hydrological modelling at a catchment scale has been used to investigate the impact of climatic and land use change on water resources in data scarce Tropical Africa using a distributed precipitation-runoff modelling system. The model divides a catchment into homogeneous hydrological response units, providing the ability to impose changes in climate or land use spatially. Model parameters wer...

Urbanization-associated land use and land cover (LULC) changes lead to modifications of surface microclimatic and hydrological conditions, including the formation of urban heat islands and changes in surface runoff pattern. The goal of the paper is to investigate the changes of biophysical variables due to urbanization induced LULC changes in Indianapolis, USA, from 2001 to 2006. The biophysica...