This study evaluated the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Forecast System (GFS) forecast bias in different precipitation (light rain, moderate rain, heavy rain and very heavy rain) by comparing the ground-based observations in three countries. Then the correlations between GFS precipitation forecast errors and the aerosol loading are investigated extensively to examin...

[1] Warm rain occurs in low‐level liquid water clouds and does not involve an ice‐phase process. Comprising many state‐of‐the‐art passive and active instruments, the NASA A‐Train series of satellites provide comprehensive simultaneous information about warm clouds and their precipitation processes. This study exploits multi‐sensor data from the A‐Train satellite constellation to investigate the...

Clearing tropical forests of the Amazon Basin for pasture alters rates of soil nitrogen cycling. Previous studies have shown that rates of soil net N mineralization and net nitri®cation are lower in established pastures than in forests. We compared soil inorganic N concentrations, rates of net and gross mineralization and net and gross nitri®cation in a chronosequence and an experimental slash-...

A rain field reconstruction and downscaling methodology is presented, which allows suitable integration of large scale rainfall information and rain-gauge measurements at the ground. The former data set is assumed to provide probabilistic indicators that are used to infer the parameters of the probability density function of the stochastic rain process at each pixel site. Rain-gauge measurement...

This study was carried out in the Eastern Plains of Colombia and assessed the impact of agricultural intensification on the structure of earthworm communities. Earthworms were hand-sorted in a variety of agroecosystems of increasing intensity, from natural savanna to pastures and annual crops. An agricultural intensification index was used to rank systems along an intensification gradient, i.e....

We compared early plant succession in four abandoned pastures of differing age since abandonment and a nearby secondary forest site in northwestern Ecuador. Two "Open" pastures had no tree canopy covering, and two "Guava" pastures had a well-developed canopy cover of Psidium guajaua. No site had been seeded with pasture grasses. All pastures were compared in a chronological sequence; nvo were m...

Diflubenzuron is an insect growth regulator labeled for application to pastures and rangeland to suppress grasshopper (Orthoptera: Acrididae) populations. Livestock are permitted access to land immediately after treatment. We hypothesized the development and survivorship of horn fly Haematobia irritans (L.) larvae feeding on manure resulting from these animals would not be impacted due to the p...

Microwave brightness temperatures are obtained from the SeaWinds scatterometer on the QuikSCAT satellite. These QuikSCAT Radiometer (QRad) measurements are used to infer instantaneous oceanic rain rates using a statistical retrieval algorithm that is based upon collocated TMI measurements. QRad instantaneous rain rate measurements have been binned in 0.5 hour local time windows onto a 0.5° x 0....

Acid rain still poses a global problem today, exerting many adverse effects on man, animal, and materials. As its research question, the present study tries to find out whether or not acid rains exist in Akure, Nigeria. For so doing, it determines physico-chemical properties of rain water samples, namely pH, temp, Electrical Conductivity (EC), TDS, acidity, SO4-, NO2-, Cl-, and Free CO2. Accord...

Short Title: Spatial-Temporal Statistics of Rain. Abstract Rain rate near the ground can be interpreted as a collection of random variables forming a random field parameterised by three coordinates: two spatial coordinates and one temporal. Interest among the radio propagation community has been focused on the first order statistics of these random variables, principally on the average annual p...