[1] We examined the effects of snow, event size, basin size, and forest harvest on floods using >1000 peak discharge events from 1953 to 2006 from three small (<1 km), paired‐watershed forest‐harvest experiments and six large (60–600 km) basins spanning the transient (400–800 m) and seasonal (>800 m) snow zones in the western Cascades of Oregon. Retrospectively classified rain‐on‐snow events de...

A study was performed using the first full year of rain gauge records from a newly deployed network in the Southern Appalachian mountains. This is a region characterized by complex topography with orographic rainfall enhancement up to 300% over small distances (<8 km). Rain gauge observations were used to assess precipitation estimates from the Precipitation Radar (PR) on board of the TRMM sate...

We demonstrate how, from the point of view of energy flow through an open system, rain is analogous to many other relaxational processes in nature such as earthquakes. By identifying rain events as the basic entities of the phenomenon, we show that the number density of rain events per year is inversely proportional to the released water column raised to the power of 1.4. This is the rain equiv...

This study examines the characteristics of winter (Dec–Feb) rain-on-snow events and their relationship to surface air temperatures to reveal potential changes in rain-on-snow days under a warming climate over northern Eurasia. We found that rain-on-snow events mostly occur over European Russia during winter. Rain-on-snow days increase as air temperature increases and are primarily attributable ...

We show that rain events are analogous to a variety of nonequilibrium relaxation processes in Nature such as earthquakes and avalanches. Analysis of high-resolution rain data reveals that power laws describe the number of rain events versus size and number of droughts versus duration. In addition, the accumulated water column displays scale-less fluctuations. These statistical properties are th...

Despite decades of research about episodic acidification in many regions of the world, the understanding of what controls the transient changes in stream water chemistry occurring during rain and snow melt events is still limited. Here, we use 20 years of hydrological and stream chemical data from the paired watershed study at Bear Brook Watershed in Maine (BBWM), USA to improve the understandi...

Localized rain events have been found to follow power-law distributions over several decades, suggesting parallels between precipitation and seismic activity [O. Peters et al., PRL 88, 018701 (2002)]. Similar power laws can be generated by treating raindrops as passive tracers advected by the velocity field of a two-dimensional system of point vortices [R. Dickman, PRL 90, 108701 (2003)]. Here ...

The presence of rain in the sub-satellite track can significantly degrade altimeter measurements by causing an attenuation of the backscattered signal, a change in its path length through the atmosphere and a change in the mean square slope of the sea surface. This can cause errors, not only in the measurement of the satellite altitude, but also in the determination of wind speed and wave heigh...

Oxygen isotopic variations in rainfall proxies such as tree rings and cave calcites from South and East Asia have been used to reconstruct past monsoon variability, mainly through the amount effect: the observed (18)O depletion of rain with increasing amount, manifested as a negative correlation of the monthly amount of tropical rain with its δ(18)O, both measured at the same station. This rela...