The effect of preferential flow on the stability of landslides is studied through numerical simulation of two types of rainfall events on a hypothetical hillslope. A model is developed that consists of two parts. The first part is a model for combined saturated/unsaturated subsurface flow and is used to compute the spatial and temporal water pressure response to rainfall. Preferential flow is s...

Rainfall forecasts compiled by the South African Weather Service (SAWS) are used daily by agriculture, industry, sportsmen and the general public. Because of the importance of the rainfall forecast, it is of considerable interest to know how reliable these forecasts are. The SAWS evaluates the rainfall forecasts issued by the Central Forecasting Office (CFO) on a daily basis. A hit score is det...

We develop a simple stochastic theory for erosion and sediment transport, based on the Poisson pulse rainfall model, in order to analyze how variability in rainfall and runoff influences drainage basin evolution. Two cases are considered: sediment transport by runoff in rills and channels and particle detachment from bedrock or cohesive soils. Analytical and numerical results show that under so...

[1] The stream power erosion law, which describes the erosion rate as a function of channel discharge and gradient, has often been used for modeling landscape evolution in regions dominated by fluvial processes. However, most previous studies utilizing the stream power erosion law simply use drainage area as a surrogate for channel discharge. Despite its convenience this simplification has impo...

[1] Rainfall variability occurs over a wide range of time scales owing to processes initiated by cloud microphysics and sustained by atmospheric circulation. A central topic in rainfall research is to determine whether rainfall variability at a given scale is caused by dynamics acting at some other scales. Random multiplicative cascades (RMCs) are standard approaches for describing rainfall var...

The contribution of rainfall forcing errors relative to model (structural and parameter) uncertainty in the prediction of soil moisture is investigated by integrating the NASA Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM), forced with hydro-meteorological data, in the Oklahoma region. Rainfall-forcing uncertainty is introduced using a stochastic error model that generates ensemble rainfall fields from sa...

In this paper, fractal dimensional analysis is used to investigate the Tamil Nadu rainfall dynamics. Here, the time series data of Tamil Nadu rainfall (annual, south west and northeast) has been analyzed using Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). For estimating the 110 years rainfall data, the scaling exponent analysis is used. The result shows a varying degree of persistence over shorter and ...

Rainfall is a driving force for the transport of environmental contaminants from agricultural soils to surficial water bodies via surface runoff. The objective of this study was to characterize the effects of antecedent soil moisture content on the fate and transport of surface applied commercial urea, a common form of nitrogen (N) fertilizer, following a rainfall event that occurs within 24 hr...

Social networks are a valuable source of information to support the detection and monitoring of targeted events, such as rainfall episodes. Since the emergence of Web 2.0, several studies have explored the relationship between social network messages and authoritative data in the context of disaster management. However, these studies fail to address the problem of the temporal validity of socia...

Rainfall intensity plays an important role in landslide prediction especially in mountain areas. However, the rainfall intensity of a location is usually interpolated from rainfall recorded at nearby gauges without considering any possible effects of topographic slopes. In order to obtain reliable rainfall intensity for disaster mitigation, this study proposes a rainfall-vector projection metho...