Impact of small-scale spatial rainfall variability on runoff modeling

1995 ◽  
Vol 173 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 309-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Faurès ◽  
D.C. Goodrich ◽  
David A. Woolhiser ◽  
Soroosh Sorooshian

Significance It will increase rainfall variability and extreme events such as droughts and floods, as well as raising temperatures. These effects may trigger cascading risks to economic, social and political stability. Impacts The EU could play a key role in moderating climate effects as it shapes migration and security policy in the Sahel. The likelihood and severity of climate impacts will depend on socio-economic and political conditions in the region. Small-scale irrigation, climate-adapted seeds and traditional soil conservation techniques can help increase resilience to climate change.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1383-1402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Davini ◽  
Jost von Hardenberg ◽  
Susanna Corti ◽  
Hannah M. Christensen ◽  
Stephan Juricke ◽  
...  

Abstract. The Climate SPHINX (Stochastic Physics HIgh resolutioN eXperiments) project is a comprehensive set of ensemble simulations aimed at evaluating the sensitivity of present and future climate to model resolution and stochastic parameterisation. The EC-Earth Earth system model is used to explore the impact of stochastic physics in a large ensemble of 30-year climate integrations at five different atmospheric horizontal resolutions (from 125 up to 16 km). The project includes more than 120 simulations in both a historical scenario (1979–2008) and a climate change projection (2039–2068), together with coupled transient runs (1850–2100). A total of 20.4 million core hours have been used, made available from a single year grant from PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and close to 1.5 PB of output data have been produced on SuperMUC IBM Petascale System at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany. About 140 TB of post-processed data are stored on the CINECA supercomputing centre archives and are freely accessible to the community thanks to an EUDAT data pilot project. This paper presents the technical and scientific set-up of the experiments, including the details on the forcing used for the simulations performed, defining the SPHINX v1.0 protocol. In addition, an overview of preliminary results is given. An improvement in the simulation of Euro-Atlantic atmospheric blocking following resolution increase is observed. It is also shown that including stochastic parameterisation in the low-resolution runs helps to improve some aspects of the tropical climate – specifically the Madden–Julian Oscillation and the tropical rainfall variability. These findings show the importance of representing the impact of small-scale processes on the large-scale climate variability either explicitly (with high-resolution simulations) or stochastically (in low-resolution simulations).


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 3859-3878 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Cristiano ◽  
Marie-Claire ten Veldhuis ◽  
Nick van de Giesen

Abstract. In urban areas, hydrological processes are characterized by high variability in space and time, making them sensitive to small-scale temporal and spatial rainfall variability. In the last decades new instruments, techniques, and methods have been developed to capture rainfall and hydrological processes at high resolution. Weather radars have been introduced to estimate high spatial and temporal rainfall variability. At the same time, new models have been proposed to reproduce hydrological response, based on small-scale representation of urban catchment spatial variability. Despite these efforts, interactions between rainfall variability, catchment heterogeneity, and hydrological response remain poorly understood. This paper presents a review of our current understanding of hydrological processes in urban environments as reported in the literature, focusing on their spatial and temporal variability aspects. We review recent findings on the effects of rainfall variability on hydrological response and identify gaps where knowledge needs to be further developed to improve our understanding of and capability to predict urban hydrological response.


2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Walsh ◽  
Josie Douglas

Improvement in Aboriginal people’s livelihoods and economic opportunities has been a major aim of increased research and development on bush foods over the past decade. But worldwide the development of trade in non-timber forest products from natural populations has raised questions about the ecological sustainability of harvest. Trade-offs and tensions between commercialisation and cultural values have also been found. We investigated the sustainability of the small-scale commercial harvest and trade in native plant products sourced from central Australian rangelands (including Solanum centrale J.M. Black, Acacia Mill. spp.). We used semi-structured interviews with traders and Aboriginal harvesters, participant observation of trading and harvesting trips, and analysis of species and trader records. An expert Aboriginal reference group guided the project. We found no evidence of either taxa being vulnerable to over-harvest. S. centrale production is enhanced by harvesting when it co-occurs with patch-burning. Extreme fluctuations in productivity of both taxa, due to inter-annual rainfall variability, have a much greater impact on supply than harvest effects. Landscape-scale degradation (including cattle grazing and wildfire) affected ecological sustainability according to participants. By contrast, we found that sustainability of bush food trade is more strongly impacted by social and economic factors. The relationship-based links between harvesters and traders are critical to monetary trade. Harvesters and traders identified access to productive lands and narrow economic margins between costs and returns as issues for the future sustainability of harvest and trade. Harvesters and the reference group emphasised that sustaining bush harvest relies on future generations having necessary knowledge and skills; these are extremely vulnerable to loss. Aboriginal people derive multiple livelihood benefits from harvest and trade. Aboriginal custodians and harvester groups involved in recent trade are more likely to benefit from research and development investment to inter-generational knowledge and skill transfer than from investments in plant breeding and commercial horticultural development. In an inductive comparison, our study found there to be strong alignment between key findings about the strategies used by harvesters and traders in bush produce and the ‘desert system’..


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Davini ◽  
Jost von Hardenberg ◽  
Susanna Corti ◽  
Hannah M. Christensen ◽  
Stephan Juricke ◽  
...  

Abstract. The Climate SPHINX (Stochastic Physics HIgh resolutioN eXperiments) project is a comprehensive set of ensemble simulations aimed at evaluating the sensitivity of present and future climate to model resolution and stochastic parameterisation. The EC-Earth Earth-System Model is used to explore the impact of stochastic physics in a large ensemble of 30-year climate integrations at five different atmospheric horizontal resolutions (from 125 km up to 16 km). The project includes more than 120 simulations in both a historical scenario (1979–2008) and a climate change projection (2039–2068), together with coupled transient runs (1850–2100). A total of 20.4 million core hours have been used, made available from a single year grant from PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and close to 1.5 PBytes of output data have been produced on SuperMUC IBM Petascale System at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) in Garching, Germany. About 140 TBytes of post-processed data are stored on the CINECA supercomputing center archives and are freely accessible to the community thanks to an EUDAT Data Pilot project. This paper presents the technical and scientific setup of the experiments, including the details on the forcing used for the simulations performed, defining the SPHINX v1.0 protocol. In addition, an overview of preliminary results is given: an improvement in the simulation of Euro-Atlantic atmospheric blocking following resolution increases is observed. It is also shown that including stochastic parameterisation in the low resolution runs helps to improve some aspects of the tropical climate – specifically the Madden-Julian Oscillation and the tropical rainfall variability. These findings show the importance of representing the impact of small scale processes on the large scale climate variability either explicitly (with high resolution simulations) or stochastically (in low resolution simulations).


2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 607-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Auguste Gires ◽  
Agathe Giangola-Murzyn ◽  
Jean-Baptiste Abbes ◽  
Ioulia Tchiguirinskaia ◽  
Daniel Schertzer ◽  
...  

1995 ◽  
Vol 173 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 283-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Goodrich ◽  
Jean-Marc Faurès ◽  
David A. Woolhiser ◽  
Leonard J. Lane ◽  
Soroosh Sorooshian

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luc Neppel ◽  
Pierre Marchand ◽  
Pascal Finaud-Guyot ◽  
Vincent Guinot ◽  
Christian Salles

<p>This study presents a new high density rain gauges network installed in urban area to study spatio-temporal structure and variability of precipitation at small scales. The preliminary results concerning gauges calibration and characterization of the rainfall spatial variability at fine scale are discussed.</p><p>In urban areas, the impervious surfaces connected to the drainage system leads to highly dynamic flows. The flood and runoff risk characterization requires  fine spatiotemporal scale to describe hydrological model input data :rainfall within spatial scale of less than 1km and temporal scale close to 1minis necessary for urban hydrological applications and risk assessment. In order to characterize small-scale rainfall spatiotemporal variability, a dense rain gauges network is deployed at Montpellier (France) with inter-gauges distances from 100m to 1km. Currently, 9 tipping bucket rain gauges  associated with 9 anemometers are acquiring rainfall and wind norm intensity every minutes. The network density and extension will be increased soon.</p><p>The first year measurements highlight a spatial variability of the 1-minute rainfall at the subkilometer scale. This observed variability is analyzed in view of the measurement uncertainty (gauge calibration, gauge error, bias due to the gauge location) to identify the natural rainfall variability.</p><p>This contribution presents the new densely extensive rainfall  network measurement, the typing bucket raingauge calibration and highlights that the observed 1-minute rainfall intensity variability  is significant and cannot be only explained by the measurement uncertainties.</p>


Author(s):  
Emmanuel Mavhura ◽  
Desmond Manatsa ◽  
Terence Mushore

Small-scale rain-fed agriculture is the main livelihood in arid to semi-arid regions of subSaharan Africa. The area is characterised by erratic rainfall and frequent droughts, making the capacity for coping with temporal water shortages essential for smallholder farmers. Focusing on the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe, this study investigates the impact of drought on food security and the strategies used by smallholder farmers to cope with drought. We used meteorological data and interviews to examine the rainfall variability in the study area and the drought-coping mechanisms employed by smallholder famers respectively. The results show that there are various strategies used by smallholder farmers to cope with the impact of drought. These strategies include drought-tolerant crop production, crop variety diversification, purchasing cereals through asset sales, non-governmental organisations’ food aid and gathering wild fruit. However, consecutive droughts have resulted in high food insecurity and depletion of household assets during droughts. Smallholder farmers in the valley have also resorted to a number of measures taken before, during and after the drought. Still, these strategies are not robust enough to cope with this uncertainty


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