Coupled climate-carbon cycle models suggest that Amazon forests are vulnerable to both long- and short-term droughts, but satellite observations showed a large-scale photosynthetic green-up in intact evergreen forests of the Amazon in response to a short, intense drought in 2005. These findings suggest that Amazon forests, although threatened by human-caused deforestation and fire and possibly ...

J Crean, KA Parton, P Hayman and JD Mullen NSW Department of Industry and Innovation, Orange NSW 2800 Charles Sturt University, Faculty of Business, Orange NSW 2800 South Australian Research and Development Institute, Adelaide Abstract. More research is needed before we know the implications of climate change for Australian farms. Nevertheless given the information at hand, an assessment can be...

During the last decade, strong negative rainfall anomalies resulting from increased sea surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic have caused extensive droughts in rainforests of western Amazonia, exerting persistent effects on the forest canopy. In contrast, there have been no significant impacts on rainforests of West and Central Africa during the same period, despite large-scale droughts ...

Droughts, which occur as a part of natural climate variability, are expected to increase in frequency and/or severity with global climate change. An improved understanding of droughts and their association with atmospheric circulation will add to the knowledge about the controls on drought, and the ways in which changes in climate may impact droughts. In this study, 1) major drought patterns ac...

Droughts often pose situations where stream water levels are lowest while human demand for water is highest. Here we present results of an observational study documenting changes in freshwater mussel communities in two southern US rivers during a multi-year drought. During a 13-year period water releases into the Kiamichi River from an impoundment were halted during droughts, while minimum rele...

China’s role on the global grain market is expected to increase as the demand for food and feed grows, both within and outside the country. This role could also be affected by unexpected crop failures caused by natural hazards. This paper uses agricultural production (rice, wheat, maize, tubers, soybeans and other grains) and natural hazards data (floods and droughts) for 31 provinces in China ...

The monthly summer monsoon rainfall over the Homogeneous Indian Monsoon region (HI) that represents most of the variance of all-India monsoon rainfall is investigated using observational data from 1880 to 2002. Severe droughts in July occur mostly during El Niño events of the boreal summer monsoon season. They occurred frequently in the late 19th to early 20th century, rarely in the middle of t...

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) have, in recent years, been recognized as the cause of the largemajority of major floods in rivers all along the U.S. West Coast and as the source of 30%–50% of all precipitation in the same region. The present study surveys the frequencywith whichARs have played a critical role as a common cause of the end of droughts on the West Coast. This question was based on the o...

Increasing heatwave and drought events can potentially alter the carbon cycle. Few studies have investigated the impacts of hundred-year return heatwaves and droughts, as those events are rare. In the summer of 2013, southern China experienced its strongest drought and heatwave on record for the past 113 years. We show that the record-breaking heatwave and drought lasted two months (from July t...

This study analyzes the changes in drought patterns in China’s major crop-growing areas over the past 60 years. The analysis was done using both weather station data and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) rainfall data to calculate the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). The results showed that the occurrences of extreme drought were the most serious in recent...