Aeolian processes are tightly linked to soil and vegetation change in arid and semi-arid systems at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Wind influences patterns of vegetation and soil within the landscape, and these patterns control wind erosion at patch to landscape scales. Aggregated at larger scales, patterns in soil and vegetation distributions influence global distributions of dust and i...

Climate change and degradation of natural resources pose daunting challenges in arid semi-arid rangelands southern Mediterranean region. Overcoming these requires considerable man...

the aim of this paper is to project extreme precipitation events in an arid and a semiarid station. in order to project climate change based on general circulation models (gcms), we have applied lars-wg[1] downscaling tool. this stochastic weather generator down-scaled the climate of two synoptic stations using hadcm3 model and a2 emission scenario for 2040. we extracted extreme precipitation e...

Rangelands are one of the most vulnerable parts concerning the climatechanges‟ impacts. These impacts are even stronger in the arid and semi-arid areas whererangeland ecosystems are in critical conditions. Therefore, it is crucial to figure out theactual dynamics of climate variations on the rangelands. The aim of this research was todetermine climate changes in Khabr rangeland, Kerman, Iran. S...

During the period 1979–1992, on average nearly 400 people each year were killed in the United States by excessive heat (NOAA 1995; Kilbourne 1997). In fact, in this period over the United States, excessive heat accounted for more reported deaths annually than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and lightning combined (NOAA 1995). Furthermore, agriculture products such as wheat, rice, corn and maize ...

Overall climatic effects on citrus fruit quality have been well-documented and are discussed by W. Reuther in his section on "Climate and Fruit Quality". These can be briefly summarized as higher sugar levels and lower acidity in humid areas with warm nights. Conversely, sugar levels tend to be lower and acidity higher in arid areas with cool nights. Such generalizations often vary when shorter...

Although laboratory studies of large mammals have revealed valuable information on thermoregulation, such studies cannot predict accurately how animals respond in their natural habitats. Through insights obtained on thermoregulatory behavior, body temperature variability, and selective brain cooling in free-living mammals, we show here how we can better understand the physiological capacity of ...

This paper analyzes utilization of renewable energy systems and efficient building envelopes in the semi-arid climate. The proposed model evaluates renewable energy systems solutions as well as economic- and energy-efficient construction materials for the net zero-energy buildings (NZEB) in semi-arid climates. The objective of this paper is to optimize total energy cost and environmental impact...