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Southern Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal
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Needing a way to deliver the information quickly and seamlessly to stakeholders, SGSF has recently developed the Southern Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal (SouthWRAP), built upon the success of the Texas Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal (TxWRAP). SouthWRAP is the primary mechanism by which SGSF is creating awareness among the public and arming state and local government planners with information to support mitigation and prevention efforts. SouthWRAP contains data for 13 Southern states, excluding Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands that did not participate in the initial SWRA project. Future updates hope to include all SGSF members.
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Fire Mapping
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Regional Fire Mapping
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Southward movement of the Pacific intertropical convergence zone AD 1400–1850
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Tropical rainfall patterns control the subsistence lifestyle of more than one billion people. Seasonal changes in these rainfall patterns are associated with changes in the position of the intertropical convergence zone, which is characterized by deep convection causing heavy rainfall near 10◦ N in boreal summer and 3◦ N in boreal winter. Dynamic controls on the position of the intertropical convergence zone are debated, but palaeoclimatic evidence from continental Asia, Africa and the Americas suggests that it has shifted substantially during the past millennium, reaching its southernmost position some time during the Little Ice Age (AD 1400–1850). However, without records from the meteorological core of the intertropical convergence zone in the Pacific Ocean, quantitative constraints on its position are lacking. Here we report microbiological, molecular and hydrogen isotopic evidence from lake sediments in the Northern Line Islands, Galápagos and Palau indicating that the Pacific intertropical convergence zone was south of its modern position for most of the past millennium, by as much as 500 km during the Little Ice Age. A colder Northern Hemisphere at that time, possibly resulting from lower solar irradiance, may have driven the intertropical convergence zone south. We conclude that small changes in Earth’s radiation budget may profoundly affect tropical rainfall.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Southward movement of the Pacific intertropical convergence zone AD 1400–1850
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Closing sentence of the abstract : We conclude that small changes in Earth’s radiation budget may profoundly affect tropical rainfall.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Space observations of inland water bodies show rapid surface warming since 1985
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Surface temperatures were extracted from nighttime thermal infrared imagery of 167 large inland water bodies distributed worldwide beginning in 1985 for the months July through September and January through March. Results indicate that the mean nighttime surface water temperature has been rapidly warming for the period 1985–2009 with an average rate of 0.045 ± 0.011°C yr−1 and rates as high as 0.10 ± 0.01°C yr−1. Worldwide the data show far greater warming in the mid‐ and high latitudes of the northern hemisphere than in low latitudes and the southern hemisphere. The analysis provides a new independent data source for assessing the impact of climate change throughout the world and indicates that water bodies in some regions warm faster than regional air temperature. The data have not been homogenized into a single unified inland water surface temperature dataset, instead the data from each satellite instrument have been treated separately and cross compared. Future work will focus on developing a single unified dataset which may improve uncertainties from any inter‐satellite biases.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Space observations of inland water bodies show rapid surface warming since 1985
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Surface temperatures were extracted from nighttime thermal infrared imagery of 167 large inland water bodies distributed worldwide beginning in 1985 for the months July through September and January through March. Results indicate that the mean nighttime surface water temperature has been rapidly warming for the period 1985–2009 with an average rate of 0.045 ± 0.011°C yr−1 and rates as high as 0.10 ± 0.01°C yr−1. Worldwide the data show far greater warming in the mid‐ and high latitudes of the northern hemisphere than in low latitudes and the southern hemisphere.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Spacie Chaney 1993.pdf
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Resources
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TRB Library
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SIM-SPA
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Spatial patterns and policy implications for residential water use
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The front yard makes a powerful visual statement about the
occupants of the residence. As visible statements, yards are likely
to induce a behavioral response on the part of neighboring
residents. As an example, residents may strive to keep their
yard as green and lush as their neighbors. For Kelowna, British
Columbia, a highly significant positive spatial lag for summer
water use implies some degree of spatial emulation in water using
behavior. Other variables such as lot size, building size, assessed
value, presence of a pool, etc. impact on water use as expected. The
presence of a spatial lag implies a spatial multiplier for water
saving innovations. If local water managers and policy makers can
influence the spatial pattern of water saving innovations, they may be
able to increase the size of the multiplier effect. Similar spatial policies
may also be applicable to other socially influenced behaviors that
leave a spatial signature, such as protecting ecologically significant
habitats in urban areas
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Spatial relationship between climatologies and changes in global vegetation activity
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Vegetation forms a main component of the terrestrial biosphere and plays a crucial role in land-cover and climate- related studies. Activity of vegetation systems is commonly quantified using remotely sensed vegetation indices (VI). Extensive reports on temporal trends over the past decades in time series of such indices can be found in literature. However, little remains known about the processes underlying these changes at large spatial scales. In this study, we aimed at quantifying the spatial relationship between changes in potential climatic growth constraints (i.e. temperature, precipitation and incident solar radiation) and changes in vegetation activity (1982–2008). We demonstrate an additive spatial model with 0.5° resolution, consisting of a regression component representing climate-associated effects and a spatially correlated field representing the combined influence of other factors, including land-use change. Little over 50% of the spatial variance could be attributed to changes in climatologies; conspicuously, many greening trends and browning hotspots in Argentina and Australia. The nonassociated model component may contain large- scale human interventions, feedback mechanisms or natural effects, which were not captured by the climatologies. Browning hotspots in this component were especially found in subequatorial Africa. On the scale of land-cover types, strongest relationships between climatologies and vegetation activity were found in forests, including indications for browning under warming conditions (analogous to the divergence issue discussed in dendroclimatology).
Keywords: climate- and human-induced change, climatologies, Gaussian random field, growth constraints, regression, spatial additive model, vegetation-activity trends
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Spatially and temporally consistent prediction of heavy precipitation from mean values
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Extreme precipitation can cause flooding, result in substantial damages and have detrimental effects on ecosystems1,2. Climate adaptation must therefore account for the greatest precipitation amounts that may be expected over a certain time span3. The recurrence of extreme-to-heavy precipitation is notoriously hard to predict, yet cost–benefit estimates of mitigation and successful climate adaptation will need reliable information about percentiles for daily precipitation. Here we present a new and simple formula that relates wet-day mean precipitation to heavy precipitation, providing a method for predicting and downscaling daily precipitation statistics. We examined 32,857 daily rain-gauge records from around the world and the evaluation of the method demonstrated that wet-day precipitation percentiles can be predicted with high accuracy. Evaluations against independent data demonstrated high skill in both space and time, indicating a highly robust methodology.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Spatiotemporal patterns of terrestrial carbon cycle during the 20th century
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We evaluated how climate change, rising atmospheric CO2 concentration, and land use change influenced the terrestrial carbon (C) cycle for the last century using a process-based ecosystem model. Over the last century, the modeled land use change emitted about 129 Pg of C to the atmosphere. .... Generally, interannual changes of carbon fluxes in tropical and temperate ecosystems are mainly explained by precipitation variability, while temperature variability plays a major role in boreal ecosystems.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
