Thesiss

Climate variability and extreme events continue to worsen resulting in significant impacts to society and the environment. Quantifying precipitation variability, streamflow, and extreme events at local scale is crucial for local planning and management due to spatial and tempora…

More than 72% of sub-Saharan Africa land surface is comprised of hard rock with fractured rock aquifers supplying water to an estimated 25% of the rural population. Given low porosity and storativity, fractured rock aquifers are particularly vulnerable to stresses such as projec…

This dissertation characterizes and examines the large-scale sources of variability driving tropical North Atlantic deep-layer vertical wind shear (VWS). VWS is a key variable for the seasonal prediction of tropical cyclone (TC) activity and can be used to assess sources of pred…

Interactions between climate variability, risk behavior and agricultural policies in Morocco are examined. The analysis employs a series of general equilibrium models that are linked together to account for risk. The model explicitly incorporates the main features of the economy…

Climate variability has large impacts on humans and their agricultural systems. Farmers are at the center of this agricultural network, but it is often agricultural planners—regional planners, extension agents, commodity groups and cooperatives—that translate climate information…

Three main objectives in this study were: (1) to examine climate variability throughout the Late Cenozoic and test hypotheses regarding the development of C4 ecosystems and the dynamics of the Asian monsoons in NW China; (2) to reconstruct the diets, habitats, and paleoclimates …

Large-scale climate modes are responsible for much of the Earth's climate variability. Despite the importance of these modes, we have limited understanding of how they vary on long timescales due to the short length of instrumental climate records. Fortunately, climate informati…

The spatiotemporal variability of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) number concentration is investigated over the extended domain of the North African continent and Mediterranean which is an essential step for better understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions and associated clima…

Part A: Water use for human needs has increased dramatically all over the world, in response to tremendous population and economic growth. In the United States alone, water consumption increased over ten-fold during the twentieth century. While the increase in water use efficien…

Uncertainty in climate predictions arises from three distinct sources: the internal variability of the climate system, which refers to natural fluctuations in climate that occur even in the absence of external forcing, model or structural uncertainty, as different models make di…