Soil moisture is a key variable in dryland ecosystems since it determines the occurrence and duration of vegetation water stress and affects the development of weather patterns including rainfall. However, the lack of ground observations of soil moisture and rainfall dynamics in many drylands has long been a major obstacle in understanding ecohydrological processes in these ecosystems. It is al...

This chapter also focusesaddresses on precipitation intensity measurements (in particular rate of rainfall or rainfall intensity) due to their rapidly increased need for the interpretation of rainfall patterns, rainfall event modeling and forecasts, everyday meteorological and engineering applications, the investigation of evolving events at the local to regional scale with potential tremendous...

Natural hazards such as extreme wind, rainfall and ocean waves can have severe impacts on built natural environments, contributing to the occurrence of disastrous events in some cases. These are often caused by weather systems cyclones, fronts thunderstorms. Previous studies typically examine one type hazard and/or system, with recent years starting focus compound hazards. Here we systematicall...

Abstract The Terrestrial Gamma‐ray Flash (TGF) to lightning ratio, computed over the three tropical chimneys, presents a paradox: African thunderstorms produce most but yield lowest fraction of TGFs when compared American and Southeast Asian thunderstorms. To understand physical insights into this asymmetry, Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Precipitation Radar measurements are used depict ve...

INTRODUCTION Three-dimensional radar reflectivity data and the algorithms used to help meteorologists interpret these data are extremely important in nowcasting. However, a number of inherent problems arise when tracking thunderstorm cells with 3-dimensional reflectivity. These problems include (1) identifying cells in a complex multi-cellular thunderstorm environment, (2) detecting thunderstor...

This paper presents a study developed at SIMEPAR (Paraná state weather service) using lightning data for electrical thunderstorm nowcasting. Thunderstorm electrical data collected at SIMEPAR such as lightning location, time of occurrence, current intensity, polarity, etc, are stored in real-time in a relational database. As a first step of this study, Microsoft Business Intelligence bundled wit...