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Variability And Potential Sources Of Predictability Of North American Runoff, Edwin P. Maurer, Dennis P. Lettenmaier, Nathan J. Mantua

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering

Understanding the space-time variability of runoff has important implications for climate because of the linkage of runoff and evapotranspiration and is a practical concern as well for the prediction of drought and floods. In contrast to many studies investigating the space-time variability of precipitation and temperature, there has been relatively little work evaluating climate teleconnections of runoff, in part because of the absence of data sets that lend themselves to commonly used techniques in climate analysis like principal components analysis. We examine the space-time variability of runoff over North America using a 50-year retrospective spatially distributed data set of runoff …