The hydrology and geochemistry of groundwater in tropical island aquifers, such as Barbados, Guam and Puerto Rico, are significantly influenced by tropical climatic conditions. Recharge to these aquifers is the product of regional and local climate patterns that control rainfall. Oxygen isotopes can be used to estimate the amount and timing of recharge on these islands because seasonal fluctuat...

We consider daily rainfall observations at 32 stations in the province of North Holland (The Netherlands) during 30 years. Let Q be the total rainfall in this area on one day. An important question is: what is the amount of rainfall Q that is exceeded once in 100 years? This is clearly a problem belonging to extreme value theory. Also it is a genuinely spatial problem. Recently, a theory of ext...

Time series of rainfall, thunderstorms, temperatures, winds and aerosols of 50 years have been analyzed at the Xian valley (1951–2005, rain rates data are only available for the period of 1961–2000 for Xian) and the nearby Mount Hua (1951–2005) in central China, for assessing the impact of the increasing air pollution on convective precipitation. Adding aerosols to pristine air initially increa...

Various studies have demonstrated that the stable hydrogen isotopic composition (dD) of terrestrial leaf waxes tracks that of precipitation (dDprecip) both spatially across climate gradients and over a range of different timescales. Yet, reconstructed estimates of dDprecip and corresponding rainfall typically remain largely qualitative, due mainly to uncertainties in plant ecosystem net fractio...

We develop a simple stochastic theory for erosion and sediment transport, based on the Poisson pulse rainfall model, in order to analyze how variability in rainfall and runoff influences drainage basin evolution. Two cases are considered: sediment transport by runoff in rills and channels and particle detachment from bedrock or cohesive soils. Analytical and numerical results show that under so...

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...

Daily rainfall occurrence and amount at 11 stations over North Queensland are examined for summers 1958– 1998, using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Daily rainfall variability is described in terms of the occurrence of five discrete ‘weather states’, identified by the HMM. Three states are characterized respectively by very wet, moderately wet, and dry conditions at most stations; two states have ...

Daily rainfall occurrence and amount at 11 stations over North Queensland are examined during summer 1958–1998, using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Daily rainfall variability is described in terms of the occurrence of five discrete “weather states,” identified by the HMM. Three states are characterized respectively by very wet, moderately wet, and dry conditions at most stations; two states have...

Papers published in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions are under open-access review for the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Abstract Global Climate Models (GCMs) precipitation scenarios are often characterized by biases and coarse resolution that limit their direct application for basin level hydrological modeling. Bias-correction and spatial disaggregation methods are ...

Intensification of the global hydrological cycle with atmospheric warming is expected to increase interannual variation in precipitation amount and the frequency of extreme precipitation events. Although studies in grasslands have shown sensitivity of aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) to both precipitation amount and event size, we lack equivalent knowledge for responses of belowgroun...