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The interplay between topography and Indian summer monsoon circulation profoundly controls precipitation distribution, sediment transport, and river discharge along the Southern Himalayan Mountain Front (SHF). The Higher Himalayas form a major orographic barrier that separates humid sectors to the south and and regions to the north. During the Indian summer monsoon, vortices transport moisture from the Bay of Bengal, swirl along the SHF to the northwest, and cause heavy rainfall when colliding with the mountain front. In the eastern and central parts of the Himalaya, precipitation measurements derived from passive microwave analysis (SSM/I) show a strong gradient, with high values at medium elevations and extensive penetration of moisture along major river valleys into the orogen. The end of the monsoonal conveyer belt is near the Sutlej Valley in the NW Himalaya, where precipitation is lower and rainfall maxima move to lower elevations. This region thus comprises a climatic transition zone that is very sensitive to changes in Indian summer monsoon strength. To constrain magnitude, temporal, and spatial distribution of precipitation, we analyzed high-resolution passive microwave data from the last decade and identified an abnormal monsoon year (AMY) in 2002. During the 2002 AMY, violent rainstorms conquered orographic barriers and penetrated far into otherwise and regions in the northwest Himalaya at elevations in excess of 3 km asl. While precipitation in these regions was significantly increased and triggered extensive erosional processes (i.e., debris flows) on sparsely vegetated, steep hillslopes, mean rainfall along the low to medium elevations was not significantly greater in magnitude. This shift may thus play an important role in the overall sediment flux toward the Himalayan foreland. Using extended precipitation and sediment flux records for the last century, we show that these events have a decadal recurrence interval during the present-day monsoon circulation. Hence, episodically occurring AMYs control geomorphic processes primarily in the high-elevation and sectors of the orogen, while annual recurring monsoonal rainfall distribution dominates erosion in the low- to medium- elevation parts along the SHF. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Flow accumulation algorithms estimate the steady state of flow on real or modeled topographic surfaces and are crucial for hydrological and geomorphological assessments, including delineation of river networks, drainage basins, and sediment transport processes. Existing flow accumulation algorithms are typically designed to compute flows on regular grids and are not directly applicable to arbitrarily sampled topographic data such as lidar point clouds. In this study we present a random sampling scheme that generates homogeneous point densities, in combination with a novel flow path tracing approach-the Facet-Flow Network (FFN)-that estimates flow accumulation in terms of specific catchment area (SCA) on triangulated surfaces. The random sampling minimizes biases due to spatial sampling and the FFN allows for direct flow estimation from point clouds. We validate our approach on a Gaussian hill surface and study the convergence of its SCA compared to the analytical solution. Here, our algorithm outperforms the multiple flow direction algorithm, which is optimized for divergent surfaces. We also compute the SCA of a 6-km(2)-steep, vegetated catchment on Santa Cruz Island, California, based on airborne lidar point-cloud data. Point-cloud-based SCA values estimated by our method compare well with those estimated by the D-infinity or multiple flow direction algorithm on gridded data. The advantage of computing SCA from point clouds becomes relevant especially for divergent topography and for small drainage areas: These are depicted with much more detail due to the higher sampling density of point clouds.
Atmospheric water vapour content is a key variable that controls the development of deep convective storms and rainfall extremes over the central Andes. Direct measurements of water vapour are challenging; however, recent developments in microwave processing allow the use of phase delays from L-band radar to measure the water vapour content throughout the atmosphere: Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based integrated water vapour (IWV) monitoring shows promising results to measure vertically integrated water vapour at high temporal resolutions. Previous works also identified convective available potential energy (CAPE) as a key climatic variable for the formation of deep convective storms and rainfall in the central Andes. Our analysis relies on GNSS data from the Argentine Continuous Satellite Monitoring Network, Red Argentina de Monitoreo Satelital Continuo (RAMSAC) network from 1999 to 2013. CAPE is derived from version 2.0 of the ECMWF’s (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) Re-Analysis (ERA-interim) and rainfall from the TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) product. In this study, we first analyse the rainfall characteristics of two GNSS-IWV stations by comparing their complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF). Second, we separately derive the relation between rainfall vs. CAPE and GNSS-IWV. Based on our distribution fitting analysis, we observe an exponential relation of rainfall to GNSS-IWV. In contrast, we report a power-law relationship between the daily mean value of rainfall and CAPE at the GNSS-IWV station locations in the eastern central Andes that is close to the theoretical relationship based on parcel theory. Third, we generate a joint regression model through a multivariable regression analysis using CAPE and GNSS-IWV to explain the contribution of both variables in the presence of each other to extreme rainfall during the austral summer season. We found that rainfall can be characterised with a higher statistical significance for higher rainfall quantiles, e.g., the 0.9 quantile based on goodness-of-fit criterion for quantile regression. We observed different contributions of CAPE and GNSS-IWV to rainfall for each station for the 0.9 quantile. Fourth, we identify the temporal relation between extreme rainfall (the 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles) and both GNSS-IWV and CAPE at 6 h time steps. We observed an increase before the rainfall event and at the time of peak rainfall—both for GNSS-integrated water vapour and CAPE. We show higher values of CAPE and GNSS-IWV for higher rainfall percentiles (99th and 95th percentiles) compared to the 90th percentile at a 6-h temporal scale. Based on our correlation analyses and the dynamics of the time series, we show that both GNSS-IWV and CAPE had comparable magnitudes, and we argue to consider both climatic variables when investigating their effect on rainfall extremes.
Remote Sensing technologies allow to map biophysical, biochemical, and earth surface parameters of the land surface. Of especial interest for various applications in environmental and urban sciences is the combination of spectral and 3D elevation information. However, those two data streams are provided separately by different instruments, namely airborne laser scanner (ALS) for elevation and a hyperspectral imager (HSI) for high spectral resolution data. The fusion of ALS and HSI data can thus lead to a single data entity consistently featuring rich structural and spectral information. In this study, we present the application of fusing the first pulse return information from ALS data at a sub-decimeter spatial resolution with the lower-spatial resolution hyperspectral information available from the HSI into a hyperspectral point cloud (HSPC). During the processing, a plausible hyperspectral spectrum is assigned to every first-return ALS point. We show that the complementary implementation of spectral and 3D information at the point-cloud scale improves object-based classification and information extraction schemes. This improvements have great potential for numerous land cover mapping and environmental applications.
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.