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A 21-yr gridded monthly fire-starts and acres-burned dataset from U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs fire reports recreates the seasonality and interannual variability of wildfire in the western United States. Despite pervasive human influence in western fire regimes, it is striking how strongly these data reveal a fire season responding to variations in climate. Correlating anomalous wildfire frequency and extent with the Palmer Drought Severity Index illustrates the importance of prior and accumulated precipitation anomalies for future wildfire season severity. This link to antecedent seasons' moisture conditions varies widely with differences in...
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Hidalgo, H.G., Dettinger, M.D., and Cayan, D.C., 2008, Changes in Aridity in the Western United States: Californa Drought: An Update -- 2008, California Department of Water Resources, State of California, p. 54-59. (on-line report in pdf format, 4148 KB)
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Imagine a stream of water thousands of kilometers long and as wide as the distance between New York City and Washington, D. C., flowing toward you at 30 miles per hour. No, this is not some hypothetical physics problem—it is a real river, carrying more water than 7–15 Mississippi Rivers combined. But it is not on land. It's a river of water vapor in the atmosphere. Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are narrow corridors of water vapor transport in the lower atmosphere that traverse long swaths of the Earth's surface as they bind together the atmospheric water cycle (Figure 1). The characteristic (indeed defining) dimensions of these ARs are (1) integrated water vapor (IWV) concentrations such that if all the vapor in the...
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Dettinger, M.D., Cayan, D.R., Meyer, M.K., and Jeton, A.E., 2004, Simulated hydrologic responses to climate variations and change in the Merced, Carson, and American River basins, Sierra Nevada, California, 1900-2099: Climatic Change, v. 62, no. 1, p. 283-317. (on-line abstract or on-line report in pdf format)
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A new method for frequency analysis of hydrologic time series was developed to facilitate the estimation and reconstruction of individual or groups of frequencies from hydrologic time-series and facilitate the comparison of these isolated time-series components across data types, between different hydrologic settings within a watershed, between watersheds, and across frequencies. While climate-related variations in inflow to and outflow from aquifers have often been neglected, the development and management of ground-water and surface-water resources has required the inclusion of the assessment of the effects of climatic variability on the supply and demand and sustainability of use. The regional assessment of climatic...
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