Cristiano das Neves Almeida

The Brazilian Cerrado has undergone profound land-use and land-cover changes, with environmental consequences that require adequate investigation. This research evaluated the impacts of land use and land cover changes (LULCC) on the radiation balance components, air temperature, and reference evapotranspiration (ETo) in the Brazilian Cerrado. The selected area is 14,503.3 km2, most of which has been used for soybean cultivation. Landsat 5, Landsat 8, and Landsat 9 images from 1984 to 2024 were selected to generate maps of biophysical variables involved in the radiation balance (albedo, NDVI, land surface temperature (LST), and net radiation (Rn)). Statistical tests were used to assess whether there is a statistically significant difference between the average values of the selected biophysical variables across seven small plots in the study area, and whether the Ta and ETo time series showed a significant trend using the Mann-Kendall test. The results show that replacing primary vegetation with agricultural and/or pasture areas has changed the patterns and values of vegetation indices, albedo, LST, Rlw,emi, and Rn. The net radiation reached its highest value in areas with high vegetation density. In contrast, in areas already affected by human activity, Rn and NDVI decreased significantly, while LST was higher than in non-human activity areas. Although in some months of the year the areas with pivots exhibited high NDVI and Rn values and low albedo and LST values, in most months these areas exhibit opposite patterns, with marked variability in the variables studied. Our analysis indicated strong shifts in albedo, LST, NDVI, and Rn due to LULCC, with consequences for the radiation balance components, clearly affecting air temperature and ETo.

Precipitation is one of the main components of the hydrological cycle and its precise quantification is fundamental to providing information for the understanding and prediction of physical processes. Precipitation observations based on ground‐based devices (manual and automatic rain gauges) are highly accurate but have limited spatial coverage. On the other hand, remote sensing products cover large areas but with lower accuracy. In this context, this study aims to provide a more accurate monthly precipitation estimating product, with lower latency than other products but without directly relying on field data. The methodology consists of applying a machine learning method (k‐nearest neighbours algorithm) to satellite‐based remote sensing data (IMERG Early Run product) and re‐analysis‐based (MERRA‐2) variables with a particular connection to precipitation. The method was applied over the Brazilian territory, which features a large range of precipitation regimes. This methodology resulted in the development of an adjusted IMERG product (IMERG BraMaL). Compared with the original IMERG products (Early Run and Final Run), IMERG BraMaL has improved the evaluated metrics between ground‐based and satellite data in almost all analyses. For instance, KGE (Kling‐Gupta efficiency) went from lower values (0.70 and 0.82 for Early and Late Run, respectively) to values above 0.86 in the IMERG BraMaL. The adjusted product also presented superior performance statistics compared with other global precipitation products (CHIRPS, PERSIANN‐CDR, and MSWEP). The main advantages of IMERG BraMaL compared with IMERG Final Run are (i) much faster availability to the end‐users; (ii) non‐dependency on any field data, allowing its application in areas where rain gauge data is unavailable or of low quality; (iii) the non‐relationship of errors to local features; and (iv) the much‐improved estimations in regions in Brazil where, historically, satellite‐based products usually underestimate the observed data.

The study of rainfall properties at various spatiotemporal scales is deeply important for understanding a large range of socio‐environmental processes and variables (e.g., water resources, agriculture, socio‐ecosystemic services, natural risk assessment). However, such studies on rainfall characteristics, especially at sub‐hourly resolutions, are scarce in large areas of South America due to the lack of a high‐resolution temporal database. The Brazilian National Centre for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN) has gradually implemented, starting in 2013, a sub‐hourly monitoring network composed of approximately 3500 automated rain gauges distributed across Brazil, enabling access to new hydrological studies in this vast tropical country featuring a range of biomes. This study analysed the characteristics of rainfall events for the whole of Brazil on sub‐daily and sub‐hourly timescales, using 7 years of data (from 2014 to 2021) provided by CEMADEN. Rainfall events were defined by the minimum inter‐event time (MIT) and the minimum depth (1 mm). Seven MITs (30, 60, 120, 180, 360, 720, and 1440 min) were considered to evaluate the behaviour of rainfall event characteristics and their relationships. The Gaussian mixture model method was applied to identify regions with similar rainfall patterns according to the MIT. Six groups with homogeneous characteristics were identified, evidencing the climatic diversity of Brazil. The results show that the MIT strongly influences precipitation properties (especially the dry time and the number of events). The highest number of events occurred in the North‐east Coast region, which exceeded 200 events per year (MIT < 60 min), while the lowest number of events was observed in the Semiarid region, which reached only 38 events per year with an MIT of 1440 min. Moreover, the events with the highest rainfall intensities were found in the Central region. The results found in this study provide a better understanding of precipitation and its characteristics in Brazil, highlighting the climatological diversity of this country.

CLIGEN is a stochastic weather generator that creates statistically representative timeseries of daily and sub-daily point-scale weather variables from observed monthly statistics and other parameters. CLIGEN precipitation timeseries are used as climate input for various risk-assessment modelling applications as an alternative to observe long-term, high temporal resolution records. Here, we queried gridded global climate datasets (TerraClimate, ERA5, GPM-IMERG, and GLDAS) to estimate various 20-year climate statistics and obtain complete CLIGEN input parameter sets with coverage of the African and South American continents at 0.25 arc degree resolution. The estimation of CLIGEN precipitation parameters was informed by a ground-based dataset of >10,000 locations worldwide. The ground observations provided target values to fit regression models that downscale CLIGEN precipitation input parameters. Aside from precipitation parameters, CLIGEN’s parameters for temperature, solar radiation, etc. were in most cases directly calculated according to the original global datasets. Cross-validation for estimated precipitation parameters quantified errors that resulted from applying the estimation approach in a predictive fashion. Based on all training data, the RMSE was 2.23 mm for the estimated monthly average single-event accumulation and 4.70 mm/hr for monthly maximum 30-min intensity. This dataset facilitates exploration of hydrological and soil erosional hypotheses across Africa and South America.