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Hydroclimatology: Perspectives and Applications Hydroclimatology provides a systematic structure for analyzing how the climate system causes time and space variations (both global and local) in the hydrologic cycle. Changes in the relationship between the climate system and the hydrologic cycle underlie floods, drought, and possible future influences of global warming on water resources. Land-based data, satellite data, and computer models contribute to our understanding of the complex time and space variations of physical processes shared by the climate system and the hydrologic cycle. Blending key information from the fields of climatology and hydrology—fields not often found in a single volume—this is an ideal textbook for students in atmospheric science, hydrology, earth and environmental science, geography, and environmental engineering. It is also a useful reference for academic researchers in these fields. Marilyn Shilton is Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, University of California, Davis, USA. He is a member of the American Water Resources Association, the Association of American Geographers, and the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. He has been elected as a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellow and a Fellow of the Ohio Academy of Science. He has authored and co-authored four previous books, published numerous scientific papers, and served as an associate editor for the Journal of the American Water Resources Association from 1991 to 1999. He has given interviews to newspapers and television stations on topics such as climate change, El Niño, floods, drought, and air quality, and has presented lectures and workshops for the US Forest Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service. M. L. Shilton University of California, Davis Hydroclimatology: Perspectives and Applications CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data ISBN 978-0-521-84888-6 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents Preface ix 1 The realm of hydroclimatology 1 2 The climate system and the hydrologic cycle 24 3 Measuring hydroclimate atmospheric components 55 4 Measuring hydroclimate terrestrial components 74 5 Remote sensing and hydroclimate data 126 6 The runoff process and streamflow 165 7 Hydroclimate spatial variations 212 8 Hydroclimate temporal variations 262 9 Floods: the hydroclimatic extreme of excessive moisture 305 10 Drought: the hydroclimatic extreme of deficient moisture 344 References 383 Index 418 Preface Droughts, floods, heatwaves, and other extreme weather events often have disastrous consequences for society and for the infrastructure that provides our goods and services. An increasing global population and an increasing population occupying areas subject to extreme weather events has heightened awareness of the potential impact of climate and weather and extreme events on our daily lives. This new awareness is occurring at a time when a consensus in the scientific community supports the idea of climate change and that at least a part of the change in recent decades is due to human activity. Against this backdrop we have advances in satellite and computer technology that permit us to examine natural processes in ways that were not possible in the recent past. Hydroclimatology is an area that benefits from these advances as it endeavors to improve understanding of the linkages between the climate system and the hydrologic cycle. A global view provides a sense of the immensity and complexity of the Earth’s climate system and the hydrologic cycle. An important suite of climatic processes involves atmospheric moisture, atmospheric energy storage in the form of latent heat, and energy transport by the atmosphere. The heating and cooling of the atmosphere and atmospheric motion define a climatic perspective easily related to the atmospheric branch of the hydrologic cycle that is dominated by moisture transport accomplished by the mobile atmosphere. At regional and local scales, additional processes are introduced into the climatic and hydrologic cycle perspectives as land surface differences exert strong influences on the exchanges of energy and mass between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. Climate related fluxes at the Earth’s surface are vertically oriented, and hydrologic processes are altered by the character of soil and vegetation. The perspectives of climate and the hydrologic cycle at the Earth’s surface have separate sets of variables that complement atmospheric processes but require different observational data. xi Ключевые слова: e, r, o