TY - GEN A1 - Seidel, Jochen A1 - Trachte, Katja A1 - Orellana-Alvear, Johanna A1 - Figueroa, Rafael A1 - Célleri, Rolando A1 - Bendix, Jörg A1 - Fernandez, Ciro A1 - Huggel, Christian T1 - Precipitation Characteristics at Two Locations in the Tropical Andes by Means of Vertically Pointing Micro-Rain Radar Observations T2 - Remote Sensing N2 - In remote areas with steep topography, such as the Tropical Andes, reliable precipitation data with a high temporal resolution are scarce. Therefore, studies focusing on the diurnal properties of precipitation are hampered. In this paper, we investigated two years of data from Micro-Rain Radars (MRR) in Cuenca, Ecuador, and Huaraz, Peru, from February 2017 to January 2019. This data allowed for a detailed study on the temporal precipitation characteristics, such as event occurrences and durations at these two locations. Our results showed that the majority of precipitation events had durations of less than 3 h. In Huaraz, precipitation has a distinct annual and diurnal cycle where precipitation in the rainy season occurred predominantly in the afternoon. These annual and diurnal cycles were less pronounced at the site in Cuenca, especially due to increased nocturnal precipitation events compared to Huaraz. Furthermore, we used a fuzzy logic classification of fall velocities and rainfall intensities to distinguish different precipitation types. This classification showed that nightly precipitation at both locations was predominantly stratiform, whereas (thermally induced) convection occurred almost exclusively during the daytime hours. KW - micro-rain radar KW - Tropical Andes KW - diurnal precipitation characteristics Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11242985 VL - 11 IS - 24 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Carrillo-Rojas, Galo A1 - Schulz, Hans Martin A1 - Orellana-Alvear, Johanna A1 - Ochoa‐Sánchez, Ana A1 - Trachte, Katja A1 - Célleri, Rolando A1 - Bendix, Jörg T1 - Atmosphere-surface fluxes modeling for the high Andes: The case of páramo catchments of Ecuador T2 - Science of the Total Environment N2 - Interest in atmosphere-surface flux modeling over the mountainous regions of the globe has increased recently, with a major focus on the prediction of water, carbon and other functional indicators in natural and disturbed conditions. However, less research has been centered on exploring energy fluxes (net radiation; sensible, latent and soil heat) and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) over the Neotropical Andean biome of the páramo. The present study assesses the implementation and parameterization of a state-of-art Land-Surface Model (LSM) for simulation of these fluxes over two representative páramo catchments of southern Ecuador. We evaluated the outputs of the LSM Community Land Model (CLM ver. 4.0) with (i) ground-level flux observations from the first (and highest) Eddy Covariance (EC) tower of the Northern Andean páramos; (ii) spatial ETa estimates from the energy balance-based model METRIC (based on Landsat imagery); and (iii) derived ETa from the closure of the water balance (WB). CLM’s energy predictions revealed a significant underestimation on net radiation, which impacts the sensible and soil heat fluxes (underestimation), and delivers a slight overestimation on latent heat flux. Modeled CLM ETa showed acceptable goodness-of-fit (Pearson R = 0.82) comparable to ETa from METRIC (R = 0.83). Contrarily, a poor performance of ETa WB was observed (R = 0.46). These findings provide solid evidence on the CLM’s accuracy for the ETa modeling, and give insights in the selection of other ETa methods. The study contributes to a better understanding of ecosystem functioning in terms of water loss through evaporative processes, and might help in the development of future LSMs’ implementations focused on climate / land use change scenarios for the páramo. KW - Tropical Andes KW - Páramo KW - CLM KW - METRIC KW - Evapotranspiration KW - Eddy covariance Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135372 SN - 0048-9697 IS - 704 ER -