The dynamics and large-scale drivers of heat wave (HW) events in Australia are well documented. However, the influence of soil moisture in modulating HWs is largely unexplored. We focus here on a recent significant HW event in southeast Australia that preceded the Black Saturday bushfires (3–7 February 2009). During this period, the southeast of Australia experienced unprecedented warm conditio...

Drought is one of the most important but least understood issues in global environmental changes. Decrease in soil moisture is an indicator of drought. Here, we analyze summer (June–August) soil moisture measurement data across 50 sites in China in order to investigate the linkage between climate change and drought. At the country scale, a significant decrease in summer soil moisture in the top...

Long-term global satellite and reanalysis soil moisture products have been available for several years. In this study, in situ soil moisture measurements from 2008 to 2012 over Southwest China are used to evaluate the accuracy of four satellite-based products and one reanalysis soil moisture product. These products are the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for the Earth observing system (A...

[1] Semiarid rangelands are a significant global sink for methane (CH4), but this sink strength may be altered by climate change. Methane uptake is sensitive to soil moisture showing a hump‐shaped relationship with a distinct optimum soil moisture level. Both CO2 and temperature affect soil moisture, but the direction of CH4 uptake response may depend on if the system is below or above the soil...

The CRSP will not be distributing this publication. Copies may be obtained by writing to the authors. A pilot study on the spatial and temporal soil moisture distribution in integrated crop-fishwetland and crop-wetland agroecosystems in Zomba-East, Malawi Daniel Jamu International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management P.O. Box 229, Zomba, Malawi Integration of aquaculture into existing...

Soil moisture is an essential climate variable (ECV) of major importance for land–atmosphere interactions and global hydrology. An appropriate representation of soil moisture dynamics in global climate models is therefore important. Recently, a first multidecadal, observation-based soil moisture dataset has become available that provides information on soil moisture dynamics from satellite obse...

Despite the importance of the coupling between vegetation dynamics and root-zone soil moisture in land-atmosphere interactions, there is no land data assimilation system (LDAS) that currently addresses this issue, limiting the capacity to positively impact weather and seasonal forecasting. We develop a new LDAS that can improve the skill of an ecohydrological model to simulate simultaneously su...

This paper presents a comparison and an evaluation of five soil moisture products based on satellite-based passive and active microwave measurements. Products are evaluated for 2005–2006 against ground measurements obtained from the soil moisture network deployed in Mali (Sahel) in the framework of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis project. It is shown that the accuracy of the soil...

Accurate prediction of soil moisture in a land surface model (LSM) is critical in improving land surface and atmosphere interactions in the atmospheric general circulation models used in numerical weather prediction and global climate models. Gravity is a relatively new source of remotely sensed data, available since the launch of the twin Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satelli...

The controls on the spatial distribution of soil moisture include static and dynamic variables. The superposition of static and dynamic controls can lead to different soil moisture patterns for a given catchment during wetting, draining, and drying periods. These relationships can be further complicated in snow-dominated mountain regions where soil water input by precipitation is largely dictat...