The climate hazards infrared precipitation with stations--a new environmental record for monitoring extremes.

The Climate Hazards group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) dataset builds on previous approaches to 'smart' interpolation techniques and high resolution, long period of record precipitation estimates based on infrared Cold Cloud Duration (CCD) observations. The algorithm i) is built around a 0.05° climatology that incorporates satellite information to represent sparsely gauged locations, ii) incorporates daily, pentadal, and monthly 1981-present 0.

Forest responses to increasing aridity and warmth in the southwestern United States.

In recent decades, intense droughts, insect outbreaks, and wildfires have led to decreasing tree growth and increasing mortality in many temperate forests. We compared annual tree-ring width data from 1,097 populations in the coterminous United States to climate data and evaluated site-specific tree responses to climate variations throughout the 20th century. For each population, we developed a climate-driven growth equation by using climate records to predict annual ring widths.

Warming of the Indian Ocean threatens eastern and southern African food security but could be mitigated by agricultural development.

Since 1980, the number of undernourished people in eastern and southern Africa has more than doubled. Rural development stalled and rural poverty expanded during the 1990s. Population growth remains very high, and declining per-capita agricultural capacity retards progress toward Millennium Development goals.

Remotely sensed data for ecosystem analyses: combining hierarchy theory and scene models.

Remotely sensed data have been used extensively for environmental monitoring and modeling at a number of spatial scales; however, a limited range of satellite imaging systems often constrained the scales of these analyses. A wider variety of data sets is now available, allowing image data to be selected to match the scale of environmental structure(s) or process(es) being examined. A framework is presented for use by environmental scientists and managers, enabling their spatial data collection needs to be linked to a suitable form of remotely sensed data.