Understanding rainfall variability, shifts and trends is of primary importance when considering the potential for biophysical, social and economic impacts. An increase in mean rainfall could enhance agricultural production and water supply. However, if this increase is associated with more extreme rainfall events, it can enhance flood frequency and intensity. Conversely, decreases in mean rainf...

Hourly or 3-hourly precipitation data from Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B42 satellite products and rain gauge records are used to characterize East Asian summer monsoon rainfall, including spatial patterns in June–August (JJA) mean precipitation amount, frequency, and intensi...

Poultry litter provides nutrients for crop and pasture production; however, it also contains fecal bacteria, sex hormones (17beta-estradiol and testosterone) and antibiotic residues that may contaminate surface waters. Our objective was to quantify transport of fecal bacteria, estradiol, testosterone and antibiotic residues from a Cecil sandy loam managed since 1991 under no-till (NT) and conve...

Unpaved resource roads have the potential to produce large amounts of sediment and can negatively impact water quality and aquatic ecology. In order to better understand the dominant controls on sediment generation from unpaved resource roads, we did 23 large-scale rainfall simulation experiments on a road section in the Honna Watershed, Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada. The experiments we...

This study anatomized algorithm effects of specific contributing area (SCA) on soil wetness estimation, consequently landslide prediction, in SHALSTAB. A subtropical mountainous catchment during three typhoon invasions is targeted. The peak 2-day rainfall intensity of the three typhoons: Haitang, Mindulle and Herb are 144, 248 and 327 mm/day, respectively. We use modified success rate (MSR) to ...

Darrin J. Greenstein, Liesl L.Tiefenthaler, and Steven M. Bay ABSTRACT Stormwater runoff is an important source of toxic substances to the marine environment, but the effects of antecedent dry period, rainfall intensity, and duration on the toxicity of runoff are not well understood. In this study, simulated rainfall was applied to parking lots to examine the toxicity of runoff while controllin...

[1] A new approach for modeling the spatial dependence in rainfall occurrence is proposed. Being motivated by a technique for coupling Markov chains in interacting particle systems, it differs from existing approaches that only attempt to reproduce pairwise spatial correlations of rainfall occurrences or apply complex nonlinear models. It has the advantage of directly modeling the joint depende...

Hyetographs (rain-intensity curves) picture the time distribution of point rainfall and are important for hydrologic and hydraulic design issues. In the study of soil erosion, specifically on movement of soil particles by raindrop impact, kinetic energy is a commonly suggested indicator of the raindrop's ability to detach soil particles from the soil mass. The kinetic energy of raindrops can be...

Tree abundance in tropical savannas exhibits large and unexplained spatial variability. Here, we propose that differentiated tree and grass water use strategies can explain the observed negative relation between maximum tree abundance and rainfall intensity (defined as the characteristic rainfall depth on rainy days), and we present a biophysical tree-grass competition model to test this idea. ...

Although it is well known that forest canopies reduce the amount and intensity of precipitation at the ground surface, little is known about how canopy interception modifies extreme events. This research investigated the effects of forest cover on intensity-duration-frequency relationships using a stochastic model to extrapolate measured rainfall and throughfall to throughfall expected during e...