Throughout the past decade, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has given an unprecedented view on global variations in terrestrial water storage. While an increasing number of case studies have provided a rich overview on regional analyses, a global assessment on the dominant features of GRACE variability is still lacking. To address this, we survey key features of temporal var...

Longer, drier summers projected for arid and semi-arid regions of western North America under climate change are likely to have enormous consequences for water resources and river-dependent ecosystems. Many climate change scenarios for this region involve decreases in mean annual streamflow, latesummer precipitation and late-summer streamflow in the coming decades. Intermittent streams are alre...

The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) has become a popular measure of drought across the globe. In this study, Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was used in annual period of time to survey on drought. Also, in order to zonation frequency of drought, geographic information system (GIS) software and Kriging method used for extracting dry areas. The zoning maps show most severe drought i...

An improved land–ocean global monthly precipitation anomaly reconstruction is developed for the period beginning in 1900. Reconstructions use the available historical data and statistics developed from the modern satellite-sampled period to analyze variations over the historical presatellite period. This paper documents the latest in a series of precipitation reconstructions developed by the au...

Article history: Received 6 May 2015 Received in revised form 16 March 2016 Accepted 19 March 2016 Available online 21 March 2016 Many studies of Quaternary climatemake use of terrestrial stable isotope records which are interpreted based on seasonal patterns of stable isotopes in modern precipitation. Multi-decade records of isotopes in rainfall allow testing of the assumed behavior of isotope...

The rapid increase of paddy field acreage has led to widely descending of groundwater table in well irrigation paddy area of low-land in Sanjiang Plain recent years. More and more “hanging pump” and partial over pumping phenomenon have been occurring in well irrigation paddy area of low-land. Therefore, the groundwater resources in Sanjiang Plain need to be recharged urgently. For solving the m...

Temperature and precipitation extremes and their potential future changes are evaluated in an ensemble of global coupled climate models participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) diagnostic exercise for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Climate extremes are expressed in terms of 20-yr return values of annual extremes of near-surface temperature and 24-h precipitatio...

Arid grassland ecosystems have significant interannual variation in carbon exchange; however, it is unclear how environmental factors influence carbon exchange in different hydrological years. In this study, the eddy covariance technique was used to investigate the seasonal and interannual variability of CO₂ flux over a temperate desert steppe in Inner Mongolia, China from 2008 to 2010. The amo...

California is currently in the midst of a record-setting drought. The drought began in 2012 and now includes the lowest calendar-year and 12-mo precipitation, the highest annual temperature, and the most extreme drought indicators on record. The extremely warm and dry conditions have led to acute water shortages, groundwater overdraft, critically low streamflow, and enhanced wildfire risk. Anal...

Climate change projections for California indicate reduction in the percentage of precipitation that falls as snow, and increase in the percentage that falls as rain, due to warmer temperatures in the future. Previous work has shown overall decreases in rainfall / snowfall ratios for the western US over the last 60 years. Of interest in this study is the quantification of snow/rain ratios for s...