New York City (NYC) is an ultra-urban region, with over 50% impervious cover and buried stream channels. Traditional flood studies rely on the presence of stream gages to detect flood stage and discharge, but these methods cannot be used in ultra-urban areas. Here we create a high-resolution radar rainfall dataset for NYC and utilize citizen and expert reports of flooding throughout the city to...

Extreme droughts and high temperatures have becomemore frequent in the last two decades, increasing fire risk in the Amazon. The overarching goal of this study is to shed light on the influence of temperature and rainfall on fire occurrence for the 1998–2013 period. We use a Poisson regression to model satellite-based monthly fire counts across the Brazilian Amazon as a function of observed rai...

Stochastic weather generators are useful for producing daily sequences that reproduce climatic statistics aggregated to, e.g., a monthly time scale, for use with biological simulation models. This paper describes a stochastic weather generator that disaggregates monthly rainfall by adjusting input parameters or by constraining output to match target rainfall totals, and demonstrates its use wit...

This study set out to investigate the trends of agriculturally-relevant rainfall characteristics among small-scale farmers in the rainfall-sensitive dry savanna agro-ecological zone of northern Ghana. Interviews are used to identify characteristics of rainfall which are deemed by the farmers as important in their food production. Time series daily rainfall data from 1960-2007 is then used to id...