Droughts are one of the most damaging climate-related hazards. The late 1960s Sahel drought in Africa and the North American Dust Bowl of the 1930s are two examples of severe droughts that have an impact on society and the environment. Due to the importance of understanding droughts, we consider the problem of their detection based on gridded datasets of precipitation. We formulate the problem ...

A nonhomogeneous hidden Markov model is proposed for relating precipitation occurrences at multiple rain gauge stations to broad-scale atmospheric circulation patterns (the so-called \downscaling problem"). We model a 15 year sequence of winter data from 30 rain stations in southwestern Australia. The rst 10 years of data are used for model development and the remaining 5 years are used for mod...

A combination of satellite data, reanalysis products and climate models are combined to monitor changes in water vapour, clear-sky radiative cooling of the atmosphere and precipitation over the period 1979-2006. Climate models are able to simulate observed increases in column integrated water vapour (CWV) with surface temperature (Ts) over the ocean. Changes in the observing system lead to spur...