Search results for "Rainfall"

Tillage Versus No-Tillage. Soil Properties and Hydrology in an Organic Persimmon Farm in Eastern Iberian Peninsula

2020

There is an urgent need to implement environmentally friendly agriculture management practices to achieve the Sustainable Goals for Development (SDGs) of the United Nations by 2030. Mediterranean agriculture is characterized by intense and millennia-old tillage management and as a consequence degraded soil. No-Tillage has been widely examined as a solution for soil degradation but No-Tillage relies more on the application of herbicides that reduce plant cover, which in turn enhances soil erosion. However, No-Tillage with weed cover should be researched to promote organic farming and sustainable agriculture. Therefore, we compare Tillage against No-Tillage using weed cover as an alternative …

Data from: Climate determinants of breeding and wintering ranges of lesser kestrels in Italy and predicted impacts of climate change

2017

Climate warming would theoretically create conditions for the breeding range expansion of pseudo-steppe Mediterranean and long-distance migrant species and provide the possibility for these to overwinter in the same breeding areas. However, contemporary changes in rainfall regimes might have negative effects on the climate suitability and in turn, shrink species potential range. The lesser kestrel Falco naumanni is highly sensitive to rainfall oscillations and has recently extended its Italian breeding range towards northern latitudes and increasing its wintering records. We modelled the effects of temperature and rainfall on current and future climate suitability for lesser kestrels in bot…

Predicting Earthquake-Induced Landslides by Using a Stochastic Modeling Approach: A Case Study of the 2001 El Salvador Coseismic Landslides

2023

In January and February 2001, El Salvador was hit by two strong earthquakes that triggered thousands of landslides, causing 1259 fatalities and extensive damage. The analysis of aerial and SPOT-4 satellite images allowed us to map 6491 coseismic landslides, mainly debris slides and flows that occurred in volcanic epiclastites and pyroclastites. Four different multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) models were produced using different predictors and landslide inventories which contain slope failures triggered by an extreme rainfall event in 2009 and those induced by the earthquakes of 2001. In a predictive analysis, three validation scenarios were employed: the first and the second …

Studying the relationships between hourly precipitation extremes and dewpoint temperature in Sicily.

2019

According to the well-known Clausius-Clapeyron relation, the maximum moisture content of the atmosphere increases with approximately 7% per degree temperature raise (CC-scaling rate). Under the hypothesis that relative humidity does not change, an increase in the water vapor should occur at the same rate. For this reason we could expect for the coming years an increase in the intensity of extreme precipitation as a consequence of the global climate warming. Trend on precipitation extremes and possible links to changes in atmospheric temperature and moisture are investigated in different parts of the world, and a number of observational studies has exhibited scaling rates that are either hig…

ESTIMATING RAINFALL EROSIVITY BY DROP SIZE DISTRIBUTIONS

Water soil erosion is a process of detachment and transport of soil particles due to rainfall and runoff and it is the main cause of the modeling of extended portions of the earth's surface. The acceleration of the process through anthropogenic perturbation has severe impacts on soil and environmental quality. Soil erosion above a certain level will reduce soil productivity over the long haul. It exposes subsoil, which has often poor qualities for crop establishment and growth, and it can lead to stand loss by sediment deposition. A fundamental property of rainfall for understanding how it is made up is the raindrop size distribution (DSD). The knowledge of the raindrop size distribution at…

Trend of inter-arrival times of rainfall events for Italian Sub-Alpine and Mediterranean areas

2011

Derivation of critical rainfall thresholds for landslide in Sicily

2015

Rainfall is the primary trigger of shallow landslides that can cause fatalities, damage to properties and economic losses in many areas of the world. For this reason, determining the rainfall amount/intensity responsible for landslide occurrence is important, and may contribute to mitigate the related risk and save lives. Efforts have been made in different countries to investigate triggering conditions in order to define landslide-triggering rainfall thresholds. The rainfall thresholds are generally described by a functional relationship of power in terms of cumulated or intensity event rainfall-duration, whose parameters are estimated empirically from the analysis of historical rainfall e…

Determinants of the interannual relationships between remote sensed photosynthetic activity and rainfall in tropical Africa

2007

International audience; The response of photosynthetic activity to interannual rainfall variations in Africa South of the Sahara is examined using 20 years (1981-2000) of Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) AVHRR data. Linear correlations and regressions were computed between annual NDVI and annual rainfall at a 0.5° latitude/longitude resolution, based on two gridded precipitation datasets (Climate Prediction Center Merged Analysis of Precipitation [CMAP] and Climatic Research Unit [CRU]). The spatial patterns were then examined to detect how they relate to the mean annual rainfall amounts, land-cover types as from the Global Land Cover 2000 data set, soil properties and soil typ…

A simple scaling procedure to assess the impact of climate change on extreme precipitation

2017

In this study we used the products of the Regional Climate Models (RCMs) to evaluate the impact of climate alterations on extreme events across the Region of Sicily (Italy). Data have been retrieved from EURO-CORDEX simulations at 12 km of spatial resolution. Because of the low resolution, the RCMs products are likely unsuitable to reproduce consistently sub-daily heavy precipitations. For this reason, extreme events at daily scale were first checked out by comparing the quantiles estimated from raingauge observations and RCMs outputs. Secondly, we implemented a temporal downscaling approach to estimate rainfall for durations of 1, 3, 6, 12, 24 hours from the modeled daily precipitation. La…

Spatial variability of dry spells duration statistical distributions

2014

Dry spells duration and its extent in space, is a key factor in water resources problems. In order to modelling the empirical distribution of dry spells (DS) frequencies observed in Sicily (i.e. in a typical Mediterranean climate), Agnese et al. (2014) successfully applied the two-parameter polylogarithm-series distribution. Because of the strong seasonality characterising Sicily’s rainfall regime, statistical analysis was separately applied to two data sets, referred to as “dry” and “wet” seasons, respectively. In this work, a similar analysis was carried out for a set of 26 DS time-series recorded in a large area (about 30000 km2), including Piedmont and the Aosta Valley. Area altitude ra…