The Budyko water balance is a fundamental concept in hydrology that links aridity to how precipitation is divided between evapotranspiration and streamflow. While the model is powerful, its ability to explain temporal changes and the influence of human activities and climate change is limited. Here we introduce a causal discovery algorithm to explore deviations from the Budyko water balance, attributing them to human interventions such as agricultural activities and snow dynamics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTime series of annual maxima daily precipitation are crucial for understanding extreme precipitation behavior and its shifts toward nonstationarity with global warming. Extreme precipitation insight assists hydraulic infrastructure design, water resource management, natural hazard prevention, and climate change adaptation. However, not even a third of the records are of sufficient length, and the number of active stations keeps decreasing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs droughts have widespread social and ecological impacts, it is critical to develop long-term adaptation and mitigation strategies to reduce drought vulnerability. Climate models are important in quantifying drought changes. Here, we assess the ability of 285 CMIP6 historical simulations, from 17 models, to reproduce drought duration and severity in three observational data sets using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHydroclimatic time series analysis focuses on a few feature types (e.g., autocorrelations, trends, extremes), which describe a small portion of the entire information content of the observations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrends in short-lived high-temperature extremes record a different dimension of change than the extensively studied annual and seasonal mean daily temperatures. They also have important socioeconomic, environmental, and human health implications. Here, we present analysis of the highest temperature of the year for approximately 9000 stations globally, focusing on quantifying spatially explicit exceedance probabilities during the recent 50- and 30-year periods.
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