Tuesday, 11 January 2005: 5:00 PM
Hydroclimatology of the North American Monsoon Region in Northwest Mexico
Poster PDF
(254.3 kB)
The North American Monsoon (NAM) system controls the warm season climate over much of southwestern North America. Characterized as a semi-arid environment, understanding of the regional behavior of the hydroclimatology and its associated modes of variability is critically important to effectively predicting and managing perpetually-stressed regional water resources. This work explores the hydroclimatology of northwestern Mexico, i.e. the core region of the NAM, by developing a detailed hydroclimatology from 15, unregulated, headwater basins along the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains in western Mexico. The present work is distinct from previous studies as it focuses on the intra-seasonal evolution of rainfall-runoff relationships and contrasts the sub-regional behavior of the rainfall-runoff response. It is found that there is substantial sub-regional coherence in the hydrological response to monsoon precipitation. Three physically-plausible regions emerge from a rotated Principal Components Analysis of streamflow and basin-averaged precipitation. Month-to-month streamflow persistence, rainfall-runoff correlation scores and runoff coefficient values demonstrate regional coherence and are generally consistent with what is currently known about sub-regional aspects NAM precipitation character.
Supplementary URL: