Abstract
To improve the understanding of water–vegetation relationships, direct comparative studies assessing the utility of satellite remotely sensed soil moisture, gridded precipitation products, and land surface model output are needed. A case study was investigated for a water-limited, lateral inflow receiving area in northeastern Australia during December 2008 to May 2009. In January 2009, monthly precipitation showed strong positive anomalies, which led to strong positive soil moisture anomalies. The precipitation anomalies disappeared within a month. In contrast, the soil moisture anomalies persisted for months. Positive anomalies of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) appeared in February, in response to water supply, and then persisted for several months. In addition to these temporal characteristics, the spatial patterns of NDVI anomalies were more similar to soil moisture patterns than to those of precipitation and land surface model output. The long memory of soil moisture mainly relates to the presence of clay-rich soils. Modeled soil moisture from four of five global land surface models failed to capture the memory length of soil moisture and all five models failed to present the influence of lateral inflow. This case study indicates that satellite-based soil moisture is a better predictor of vegetation water availability than precipitation in environments having a memory of several months and thus is able to persistently affect vegetation dynamics. These results illustrate the usefulness of satellite remotely sensed soil moisture in ecohydrology studies. This case study has the potential to be used as a benchmark for global land surface model evaluations. The advantages of using satellite remotely sensed soil moisture over gridded precipitation products are mainly expected in lateral-inflow and/or clay-rich regions worldwide.
Highlights
Improved knowledge of biosphere–atmosphere interactions is essential for understanding climate dynamics [1]
By examining a casereceived where over lateral was we the clearly primary cause of soil moisture as opposed to precipitation theinflow landscape, demonstrated moisture increase, as opposed to precipitation received over the landscape, we clearly demonstrated the advantages of using satellite soil moisture rather than gridded precipitation products or land the advantages of using satellite soil moisture rather than gridded precipitation products or land surface model output to assess vegetation dynamics
In a direct regional comparison between satellite remotely sensed soil moisture and gridded precipitation of water-related vegetation dynamics, this paper demonstrated that satellite remotely sensed soil moisture was superior to precipitation to assess vegetation dynamics in a large lateral inflow receiving area in northeastern Australia
Summary
Improved knowledge of biosphere–atmosphere interactions is essential for understanding climate dynamics [1]. While precipitation is considered to be the main contributor governing the variance of interannual vegetation activity in the temperate and boreal. Eurasia [4] and the Sahel [5,6], soil moisture is more directly related to vegetation dynamics because it determines the water availability for vegetation [7,8]. Station and satellite observations of precipitation and NDVI, respectively, are often used to investigate the co-relationships between water availability and vegetation dynamics. Wang et al [11] found that the precipitation changes preceded those in NDVI by about two weeks to two months in the central Great Plains of the United States. Similar results were illustrated in Central Asia (1–3 months) [12] and in the Colorado River Basin (1–2 months) [13]
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