Soil Moisture Atmosphere Interactions Research Articles

Microwave and Meteorological Fusion: A method of Spatial Downscaling of Remotely Sensed Soil Moisture

Downscaling of microwave remotely sensed that soil moisture content (SMC) is an efficient way to obtain spatial continuous SMC at a finer resolution. However, the classical optical/thermal and microwave fusion, and the active and passive microwave fusion cannot work under all-weather conditions because of contamination of clouds or the lack of suitable radar data source. In this study, a microwave and meteorological fusion (MMF) is provided. The MMF method is based on a complementary relationship hypothesis assuming SMC is reflected in the adjacent surface atmospheric moisture under midday conditions. By this method, daily passive SMC products from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission with 36-km resolution were disaggregated using a daily gridded meteorological data with nominal 4-km resolution. The original and downscaled SMCs were evaluated by comparing with in situ SMC obtained from three core validation sites and three sparse networks. The experiment was conducted in the central part of the U.S. from April 2015 to June 2018. Results demonstrated that the downscaled SMC maintained the dynamic range of original SMC product and energy was conserved. Furthermore, the downscaled SMC showed good agreement with and slightly outperformed the original SMC as compared with in situ SMC. The downscaling method is shown to capture higher resolution SMC spatial variability while preserving the quality of original SMC. However, because of the complexity of soil moisture-atmosphere interactions, the actual contributing domain of downscaled SMC may be greater than 4 km. The MMF method is suggested as a supplementary for all-weather downscaling coarse-resolution SMC.

The Role of Soil Moisture–Atmosphere Interaction on Future Hot Spells over North America as Simulated by the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM5)

Soil moisture–atmosphere interactions play a key role in modulating climate variability and extremes. This study investigates how soil moisture–atmosphere coupling may affect future extreme events, particularly the role of projected soil moisture in modulating the frequency and maximum duration of hot spells over North America, using the fifth-generation Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM5). With this objective, CRCM5 simulations, driven by two coupled general circulation models (MPI-ESM and CanESM2), are performed with and without soil moisture–atmosphere interactions for current (1981–2010) and future (2071–2100) climates over North America, for representative concentration pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5. Analysis indicates that, in future climate, the soil moisture–temperature coupling regions, located over the Great Plains in the current climate, will expand farther north, including large parts of central Canada. Results also indicate that soil moisture–atmosphere interactions will play an important role in modulating temperature extremes in the future by contributing more than 50% to the projected increase in hot-spell days over the southern Great Plains and parts of central Canada, especially for the RCP4.5 scenario. This higher contribution of soil moisture–atmosphere interactions to the future increases in hot-spell days for RCP4.5 is related to the fact that the projected decrease in soil moisture caused the soil to remain in a transitional regime between wet and dry state that is conducive to soil moisture–atmosphere coupling. For the RCP8.5 scenario, on the other hand, the future projected soil state over the southern United States and northern Mexico is too dry to have an impact on evapotranspiration and therefore on temperature.

Interannual Coupling between Summertime Surface Temperature and Precipitation over Land: Processes and Implications for Climate Change*

Abstract Widespread negative correlations between summertime-mean temperatures and precipitation over land regions are a well-known feature of terrestrial climate. This behavior has generally been interpreted in the context of soil moisture–atmosphere coupling, with soil moisture deficits associated with reduced rainfall leading to enhanced surface sensible heating and higher surface temperature. The present study revisits the genesis of these negative temperature–precipitation correlations using simulations from the Global Land–Atmosphere Coupling Experiment–phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (GLACE-CMIP5) multimodel experiment. The analyses are based on simulations with five climate models, which were integrated with prescribed (noninteractive) and with interactive soil moisture over the period 1950–2100. While the results presented here generally confirm the interpretation that negative correlations between seasonal temperature and precipitation arise through the direct control of soil moisture on surface heat flux partitioning, the presence of widespread negative correlations when soil moisture–atmosphere interactions are artificially removed in at least two out of five models suggests that atmospheric processes, in addition to land surface processes, contribute to the observed negative temperature–precipitation correlation. On longer time scales, the negative correlation between precipitation and temperature is shown to have implications for the projection of climate change impacts on near-surface climate: in all models, in the regions of strongest temperature–precipitation anticorrelation on interannual time scales, long-term regional warming is modulated to a large extent by the regional response of precipitation to climate change, with precipitation increases (decreases) being associated with minimum (maximum) warming. This correspondence appears to arise largely as the result of soil moisture–atmosphere interactions.

Impact of Soil Moisture–Atmosphere Interactions on Surface Temperature Distribution

Abstract Understanding how different physical processes can shape the probability distribution function (PDF) of surface temperature, in particular the tails of the distribution, is essential for the attribution and projection of future extreme temperature events. In this study, the contribution of soil moisture–atmosphere interactions to surface temperature PDFs is investigated. Soil moisture represents a key variable in the coupling of the land and atmosphere, since it controls the partitioning of available energy between sensible and latent heat flux at the surface. Consequently, soil moisture variability driven by the atmosphere may feed back onto the near-surface climate—in particular, temperature. In this study, two simulations of the current-generation Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Earth System Model, with and without interactive soil moisture, are analyzed in order to assess how soil moisture dynamics impact the simulated climate. Comparison of these simulations shows that soil moisture dynamics enhance both temperature mean and variance over regional “hotspots” of land–atmosphere coupling. Moreover, higher-order distribution moments, such as skewness and kurtosis, are also significantly impacted, suggesting an asymmetric impact on the positive and negative extremes of the temperature PDF. Such changes are interpreted in the context of altered distributions of the surface turbulent and radiative fluxes. That the moments of the temperature distribution may respond differentially to soil moisture dynamics underscores the importance of analyzing moments beyond the mean and variance to characterize fully the interplay of soil moisture and near-surface temperature. In addition, it is shown that soil moisture dynamics impacts daily temperature variability at different time scales over different regions in the model.

Impact of the soil hydrology scheme on simulated soil moisture memory

Soil moisture–atmosphere feedback effects play an important role in several regions of the globe. For some of these regions, soil moisture memory may contribute significantly to the state and temporal variation of the regional climate. Identifying those regions can help to improve predictability in seasonal to decadal climate forecasts. In order to accurately simulate soil moisture memory and associated soil moisture–atmosphere interactions, an adequate representation of soil hydrology is required. The present study investigates how different setups of a soil hydrology scheme affect soil moisture memory simulated by the global climate model of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, ECHAM6/JSBACH. First, the standard setup is applied in which soil water is represented by a single soil moisture reservoir corresponding to the root zone. Second, a new five layer soil hydrology scheme is introduced where not only the root zone is differentiated into several layers but also layers below are added. Here, three variants of the new scheme are utilized to analyse how different characteristics of the soil hydrology and the associated fluxes influence soil moisture memory. Soil moisture memory of the different setups is analysed from global ECHAM6/JSBACH simulations forced by observed SST. Areas are highlighted where the regional climate seems to be sensitive to the improved representation of soil hydrology in the new setup and its variants. Results indicate that soil moisture memory is generally enlarged in regions during the dry season where a soil moisture buffer is present below the root zone due to the 5-layer scheme. This effect is usually enhanced when this buffer is increased. Memory tends to be weakened (strengthened) where bare soil evaporation is increased (decreased), especially in semi-arid regions and wet seasons. For some areas, this effect is compensated by a decreased (increased) transpiration.

Role of soil moisture in the amplification of climate warming in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East

Projections for the 21st century suggest that climate change will be associated with changes in the frequency and intensity of weather and climate extremes (e.g. heat waves, droughts, heavy precipitation events). In the already warm summertime eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (EMME) climate change may involve mechanisms and feedbacks that cause or intensify hot weather events. A potentially important feedback mechanism involves soil moisture� atmosphere interactions. When the soil water content and evapotranspiration are decreased, near- surface air temperatures are enhanced due to reduced evaporative cooling. Here we show the importance of this mechanism, especially in the northern part of the EMME, using the output of a regional climate model (HadRM3P). We applied the classical hydrology framework to define evapotranspiration regimes as a function of soil moisture and latent heat fluxes. Further, we used the correlation of summer maximum temperature and evapotranspiration as a diagnostic of this coupling, and we performed a composite analysis of maximum temperature for the dry and wet years of our dataset. Since temperature and precipitation regimes are expected to change in the EMME, we considered alterations of the relationship between soil moisture and the maximum temperature throughout the 21st century.

Analysis of extreme summers and prior late winter/spring conditions in central Europe

Abstract. Drought and heat waves during summer in mid-latitudes are a serious threat to human health and agriculture and have negative impacts on the infrastructure, such as problems in energy supply. The appearance of such extreme events is expected to increase with the progress of global warming. A better understanding of the development of extremely hot and dry summers and the identification of possible precursors could help improve existing seasonal forecasts in this regard, and could possibly lead to the development of early warning methods. The development of extremely hot and dry summer seasons in central Europe is attributed to a combined effect of the dominance of anticyclonic weather regimes and soil moisture–atmosphere interactions. The atmospheric circulation largely determines the amount of solar irradiation and the amount of precipitation in an area. These two variables are themselves major factors controlling the soil moisture. Thus, solar irradiation and precipitation are used as proxies to analyse extreme sunny and dry late winter/spring and summer seasons for the period 1958–2011 in Germany and adjacent areas. For this purpose, solar irradiation data from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast 40-yr and interim re-analysis dataset, as well as remote sensing data are used. Precipitation data are taken from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project. To analyse the atmospheric circulation geopotential data at 850 hPa are also taken from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast 40-yr and interim re-analysis datasets. For the years in which extreme summers in terms of high solar irradiation and low precipitation are identified, the previous late winter/spring conditions of solar irradiation and precipitation in Germany and adjacent areas are analysed. Results show that if the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is not very intensely developed, extremely high solar irradiation amounts, together with extremely low precipitation amounts during late winter/spring, might serve as precursor of extremely sunny and dry summer months to be expected.

Soil Moisture–Atmosphere Interactions during the 2003 European Summer Heat Wave

Abstract The role of land surface–related processes and feedbacks during the record-breaking 2003 European summer heat wave is explored with a regional climate model. All simulations are driven by lateral boundary conditions and sea surface temperatures from the ECMWF operational analysis and 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-40), thereby prescribing the large-scale circulation. In particular, the contribution of soil moisture anomalies and their interactions with the atmosphere through latent and sensible heat fluxes is investigated. Sensitivity experiments are performed by perturbing spring soil moisture in order to determine its influence on the formation of the heat wave. A multiyear regional climate simulation for 1970–2000 using a fixed model setup is used as the reference period. A large precipitation deficit together with early vegetation green-up and strong positive radiative anomalies in the months preceding the extreme summer event contributed to an early and rapid loss of soil moisture, which exceeded the multiyear average by far. The exceptionally high temperature anomalies, most pronounced in June and August 2003, were initiated by persistent anticyclonic circulation anomalies that enabled a dominance of the local heat balance. In this experiment the hottest phase in early August is realistically simulated despite the absence of an anomaly in total surface net radiation. This indicates an important role of the partitioning of net radiation in latent and sensible heat fluxes, which is to a large extent controlled by soil moisture. The lack of soil moisture strongly reduced latent cooling and thereby amplified the surface temperature anomalies. The evaluation of the experiments with perturbed spring soil moisture shows that this quantity is an important parameter for the evolution of European heat waves. Simulations indicate that without soil moisture anomalies the summer heat anomalies could have been reduced by around 40% in some regions. Moreover, drought conditions are revealed to influence the tropospheric circulation by producing a surface heat low and enhanced ridging in the midtroposphere. This suggests a positive feedback mechanism between soil moisture, continental-scale circulation, and temperature.