Southwest China (SC) has suffered a series of super extreme droughts in the last decade. This study analyzed the temporal and spatial variations of drought in SC from 1961 to 2012. Based on precipitation anomaly index (PAI) that was derived from 1 km gridded precipitation data, three time scales (month, year and decade) for the drought frequency (DF) and drought area were applied to estimate th...

In recent years, the increased intensity and duration of droughts have dramatically altered the structure and function of grassland ecosystems, which have been forced to adapt to this change in climate. Combinations of global change drivers such as elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration, warming, nitrogen (N) deposition, grazing, and land-use change have influenced the impact that droughts have...

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 ...

The paper aims at exploring the viability of the Florida snail kite population under various drought regimes in its wetland habitat. The population dynamics of snail kites are strongly linked with the hydrology of the system due to the dependence of this bird species on one exclusive prey species, the apple snail, which is negatively affected by a drying out of habitat. Based on empirical evide...

[1] In this paper, we investigate floods and droughts in the Upper Mississippi basin over a 50-year period (1950–1999) using a hydrological model (Variable Infiltration Capacity Model – 3 Layer). Simulations have been carried out between January 1950 and December 1999 at daily timestep and 1/8 spatial resolution for the water budget and at hourly time-step and 1 spatial resolution for the energ...

A combination of climate events (e.g., low precipitation and high temperatures) may cause a significant impact on the ecosystem and society, although individual events involved may not be severe extremes themselves. Analyzing historical changes in concurrent climate extremes is critical to preparing for and mitigating the negative effects of climatic change and variability. This study focuses o...

Midlatitude regions experienced frequent droughts during the twentieth century, but their impacts on terrestrial carbon balance are unclear. This paper presents a century-scale study of drought effects on the carbon balance of terrestrial ecosystems in China. The authors first characterized the severe extended droughts over the period 1901–2002 using the Palmer drought severity index and then e...

The growing number and effectiveness of earth observation satellite systems, along with the increasing reliability of remote sensing methodologies and techniques, present a wide range of new capabilities in monitoring and assessing droughts. In this paper, several drought features are analyzed and assessed by using remotely sensed Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI). The developed methodology is...

Droughts are a recurrent and natural part of the Australian hydroclimate, with evidence of drought dating back thousands of years. However, our ability to monitor, attribute, forecast and manage drought is exposed as insufficient whenever a drought occurs. This paper summarises what is known about drought hazard, as opposed to the impacts of drought, in Australia and finds that, unlike other hy...