A biased coinflip Ansatz leads to the Schreiber-Budyko relation, which represents a surrogate regional scale climate model describing the physical and stochastic properties (including variances and extremes) of the rainfall-runoff chain over land. Combined with a minimalist model of terminal lakes we can characterize the land surface climate in terms of dimensionless ratios which comprise the climate state: the dryness, runoff, and lake area ratios. Thus, given the lake area ratio and its sensitivity, the state of the climate and its sensitivity can be derived. Examples are presented for the worlds largest terminal lakes. |