TY  - JOUR
A1  - Castino, Fabiana
A1  - Bookhagen, Bodo
A1  - Strecker, Manfred
T1  - Rainfall variability and trends of the past six decades (1950-2014) in the subtropical NW Argentine Andes
JF  - Climate dynamics : observational, theoretical and computational research on the climate system
N2  - The eastern flanks of the Central Andes are characterized by deep convection, exposing them to hydrometeorological extreme events, often resulting in floods and a variety of mass movements. We assessed the spatiotemporal pattern of rainfall trends and the changes in the magnitude and frequency of extreme events (ae<yen>95th percentile) along an E-W traverse across the southern Central Andes using rain-gauge and high-resolution gridded datasets (CPC-uni and TRMM 3B42 V7). We generated different climate indices and made three key observations: (1) an increase of the annual rainfall has occurred at the transition between low (< 0.5 km) and intermediate (0.5-3 km) elevations between 1950 and 2014. Also, rainfall increases during the wet season and, to a lesser degree, decreases during the dry season. Increasing trends in annual total amounts characterize the period 1979-2014 in the arid, high-elevation southern Andean Plateau, whereas trend reversals with decreasing annual total amounts were found at low elevations. (2) For all analyzed periods, we observed small or no changes in the median values of the rainfall-frequency distribution, but significant trends with intensification or attenuation in the 95th percentile. (3) In the southern Andean Plateau, extreme rainfall events exhibit trends towards increasing magnitude and, to a lesser degree, frequency during the wet season, at least since 1979. Our analysis revealed that low (< 0.5 km), intermediate (0.5-3 km), and high-elevation (> 3 km) areas respond differently to changing climate conditions, and the transition zone between low and intermediate elevations is characterized by the most significant changes.
KW  - Extreme rainfall
KW  - South American Monsoon System
KW  - Central Andes
KW  - Quantile regression
KW  - Rain gauges
KW  - CPC-uni
KW  - TRMM
KW  - Orographic barrier
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3127-2
SN  - 0930-7575
SN  - 1432-0894
VL  - 48
SP  - 1049
EP  - 1067
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Castino, Fabiana
A1  - Bookhagen, Bodo
A1  - Strecker, Manfred
T1  - Oscillations and trends of river discharge in the southern Central Andes and linkages with climate variability
JF  - Journal of hydrology
N2  - This study analyzes the discharge variability of small to medium drainage basins (10(2)-10(4) km(2)) in the southern Central Andes of NW Argentina. The Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) was applied to evaluate non-stationary oscillatory modes of variability and trends, based on four time series of monthly normalized discharge anomaly between 1940 and 2015. Statistically significant trends reveal increasing discharge during the past decades and document an intensification of the hydrological cycle during this period. An Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) analysis revealed that discharge variability in this region can be best described by five quasi-periodic statistically significant oscillatory modes, with mean periods varying from 1 to 20 y. Moreover, we show that discharge variability is most likely linked to the phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) at multi-decadal timescales (similar to 20 y) and, to a lesser degree, to the Tropical South Atlantic SST anomaly (TSA) variability at shorter timescales (similar to 2-5 y). Previous studies highlighted a rapid increase in discharge in the southern Central Andes during the 1970s, inferred to have been associated with the global 1976-77 climate shift. Our results suggest that the rapid discharge increase in the NW Argentine Andes coincides with the periodic enhancement of discharge, which is mainly linked to a negative to positive transition of the PDO phase and TSA variability associated with a long-term increasing trend. We therefore suggest that variations in discharge in this region are largely driven by both natural variability and the effects of global climate change. We furthermore posit that the links between atmospheric and hydrologic processes result from a combination of forcings that operate on different spatiotemporal scales. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
KW  - River discharge
KW  - Central Andes
KW  - Empirical Mode Decomposition
KW  - PDO
KW  - Climate variability
KW  - Global climate change
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.10.001
SN  - 0022-1694
SN  - 1879-2707
VL  - 555
SP  - 108
EP  - 124
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tofelde, Stefanie
A1  - Schildgen, Taylor F.
A1  - Savi, Sara
A1  - Pingel, Heiko
A1  - Wickert, Andrew D.
A1  - Bookhagen, Bodo
A1  - Wittmann, Hella
A1  - Alonso, Ricardo N.
A1  - Cottle, John
A1  - Strecker, Manfred
T1  - 100 kyr fluvial cut-and-fill terrace cycles since the Middle Pleistocene in the southern Central Andes, NW Argentina
JF  - Earth & planetary science letters
N2  - Fluvial fill terraces in intermontane basins are valuable geomorphic archives that can record tectonically and/or climatically driven changes of the Earth-surface process system. However, often the preservation of fill terrace sequences is incomplete and/or they may form far away from their source areas, complicating the identification of causal links between forcing mechanisms and landscape response, especially over multi-millennial timescales. The intermontane Toro Basin in the southern Central Andes exhibits at least five generations of fluvial terraces that have been sculpted into several-hundred-meter-thick Quaternary valley-fill conglomerates. New surface-exposure dating using nine cosmogenic Be-10 depth profiles reveals the successive abandonment of these terraces with a 100 kyr cyclicity between 75 +/- 7 and 487 +/- 34 ka. Depositional ages of the conglomerates, determined by four Al-26/Be-10 burial samples and U-Pb zircon ages of three intercalated volcanic ash beds, range from 18 +/- 141 to 936 +/- 170 ka, indicating that there were multiple cut-and-fill episodes. Although the initial onset of aggradation at similar to 1 Ma and the overall net incision since ca. 500 ka can be linked to tectonic processes at the narrow basin outlet, the superimposed 100 kyr cycles of aggradation and incision are best explained by eccentricity-driven climate change. Within these cycles, the onset of river incision can be correlated with global cold periods and enhanced humid phases recorded in paleoclimate archives on the adjacent Bolivian Altiplano, whereas deposition occurred mainly during more arid phases on the Altiplano and global interglacial periods. We suggest that enhanced runoff during global cold phases - due to increased regional precipitation rates, reduced evapotranspiration, or both - resulted in an increased sediment-transport capacity in the Toro Basin, which outweighed any possible increases in upstream sediment supply and thus triggered incision. Compared with two nearby basins that record precessional (21-kyr) and long-eccentricity (400-kyr) forcing within sedimentary and geomorphic archives, the recorded cyclicity scales with the square of the drainage basin length. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
KW  - Be-10 depth-profiles
KW  - surface inflation
KW  - aggradation-incision cycles
KW  - glacial-interglacial cycles
KW  - landscape response to climate change
KW  - Eastern Cordillera
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2017.06.001
SN  - 0012-821X
SN  - 1385-013X
VL  - 473
SP  - 141
EP  - 153
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -