Preface ''Precipitation: Measurement, Climatology, Remote Sensing, and Modeling (EGU 2010)''

Abstract

This Special Issue of Advances in Geosciences, hosts papers mostly from the General Session on Precipitation that was organized within the framework of the Atmospheric Science Division of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna from 2 to 7 May, 2010. In the first paper, Thurai et al. (2011) discuss the way in which precipitation measurements from a 2-D video disdrometer were used for drop size distribution (DSD) comparisons with co-located Parsivel measurements. The comparisons were made in terms of the mass-weighted mean diameter, the standard deviation of the mass-spectrum and the rainfall rate, all based on 1-min DSD from the two instruments. Time series comparisons show close agreement in all three parameters for cases where the rainfall rate was less than 20 mm h 1 . The second and third papers comprise climatological studies on precipitation. A climatic study was performed by Costa (2011) in which the yearly changes in precipitation from 1940 to 1999, on local and regional scales, over the southern region of continental Portugal were analyzed. The Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) time series with a 12month time scale was calculated for 43 meteorological stations; a geostatistical approach was used to evaluate the temporal dynamics of the spatial patterns of precipitation. A geostatistical simulation algorithm was also used to produce 100 equiprobable maps of the SPI for each year and this gridded data set was used to produce yearly scenarios of the SPI from 1940 to 1999 and uncertainty evaluations of the scenarios produced. Takahashi (2011) investigated the longterm changes in rainfall and associated tropical cyclone activity in transition seasons (between wet and dry seasons) in South and Southeast Asia, using gridded rainfall, tropical cy