Global Precipitations and Climate Change

Section 1 Precipitation paleoclimatology.- Natural variability of the Asian, Indian and African monsoons over the last 130 KA.- Fluctuations of the Indian monsoon regime during the last 170,000 years: evidence from sea surface temperature, salinity and organic carbon records.- Accumulation at the surface of polar ice sheets: observation and modelling for global climate change.- Global climate changes and humidity variations over East Europe and Asia by historical data.- Regional climate change scenario based on paleoclimatic data.- Section 2 Recent precipitation history and existing climatologies.- Precipitation changes over the Northern Hemispheric Extratropics during the last hundred years.- The recent West African rainfall variability through empirical and modelling investigations.- Extreme precipitation in the Northern hemisphere.- Possible impacts of climate change upon the water balance in Central Europe.- Section 3 Methodologies of large scale estimation of precipitation from conventional data.- Terrestrial precipitation analysis: operational method and required density of point measurements.- Cartography of statistical pluviometric field with an automatic allowance for regional topography.- Approaches for regionalization of precipitation climates in the context of global climate change monitoring.- Spatial and temporal inhomogeneity of global precipitation data.- The effect of dimensions and shape of precipitation gauges on the wind-induced error.- Section 4 Methodologies of global scale precipitation from satellite data.- Use of microwave radiometry to estimate precipitation: physical basis and intercomparison of algorithms.- Combination of satellite microwaye and infrared measurements for rainfall estimation.- Satellite derived rainfaU estimates over Africa: their validation and use in monitoring climate change.- On the use of the normalized difference vegetation index as an indicator of rainfall.- Section 5 Validation and initialization of numerical models.- Improved precipitation forecast skill from the use of physical initialization.- Future cloud representation in the ECMWF model.- Analysis and prediction of the rainfall in the Tropics.- Understanding perturbations of the Intertropical Convergence Zone over tropical continents.- The hydrological cycle in the ECHAM3 simulations of the atmospheric circulation.- The parameterization of the precipitation process in the LMD general circulation model.- Validation of large-scale precipitation fields in global circulation models.- Section 6 Status of precipitation climatologies and current programmes.- The global precipitation climatology project.- Global and terrestrial precipitation climatologies: an overview and some intercomparisons.- Precipitation distributions from combined airborne microwave radiometric/radar measurements and ground based VLF sferics observations in support of Nasa's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission.- Recommendations of the working groups at the end of the workshop.- Alphabetical list of authors.