In the western United States, more than 79000 km has been converted to irrigated agriculture and urban areas. These changes have the potential to alter surface temperature by modifying the energy budget at the land–atmosphere interface. This study reports the seasonally varying temperature responses of four regional climate models (RCMs) – RSM, RegCM3, MM5-CLM3, and DRCM – to conversion of pote...

[1] Study of the effect of current climate changes on vegetation growth, and their spatial patterns improves our understanding of the interactions between terrestrial ecosystems and climatic systems. This paper explores the spatial patterns of vegetation growth responding to climate variability over Northern Hemisphere (>25 N) from 1980 to 2000 using a mechanistic terrestrial carbon model. The ...

To meet the demand of regional hydrological and agricultural applications, a new method named near infrared-red (NIR-red) spectra-based disaggregation (NRSD) was proposed to perform a disaggregation of Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) products from 36 km to 250 m resolution. The NRSD combined proposed normalized soil moisture index (NSMI) with SMAP data to obtain 250 m resolution soil moistu...

This paper investigates a simplified polarimetric decomposition for soil moisture retrieval over agricultural fields. In order to overcome the coherent superposition of the backscattering contributions from vegetation and underlying soils, a simplification of an existing polarimetric decomposition is proposed in this study. It aims to retrieve the soil moisture by using only the surface scatter...

The Community Land Model (CLM3) Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (CLMDGVM) is used diagnostically to identify land and atmospheric model biases that lead to biases in the simulated vegetation. The CLM-DGVM driven with observed atmospheric data (offline simulation) underestimates global forest cover, overestimates grasslands, and underestimates global net primary production. These results are con...

A methodology for retrieving surface soil moisture and vegetation optical depth from satellite microwave radiometer data is presented. The procedure is tested with historical 6.6 GHz and polarized brightness temperature observations from the scanning multichannel microwave radiometer (SMMR) over several test sites in Illinois. Results using only nighttime data are presented at this time due to ...

Soil moisture scarcity has become the major limiting factor of vegetation restoration in the Loess Plateau of China. The aim of this study is: (i) to compare the spatial distribution of deep (up to 5 m) soil moisture content (SMC) beneath the introduced shrub Caragana korshinskii Kom. under different precipitation zones in the Loess Plateau and (ii) to investigate the impacts of environmental f...

[1] The spatiotemporal behavior of soil and vegetation moisture over mainland Australia was analyzed using passive microwave observations by four satellites going back to late 1978. Differences in measurement specifications prevented merging the data directly. A continuous product was developed for Australia by scaling percentiles of the cumulative moisture distribution within each grid cell to...

The soil moisture content is of great importance for numerical weather forecasts and has been identified as one of the parameter products of EUMETSAT’s Satellite Application Facility on Land Surface Analysis (Land SAF). Soil moisture strongly affects the surface energy balance and therefore near surface temperature and humidity. Conversely, temperature observations may be used to infer the soil...

Groundwater is an important ecological water source in arid areas. depth (GWD) indicator that affects vegetation growth and soil salinization. Clarifying the coupling relationship between vegetation, groundwater, areas beneficial to prevention of environmental problems such as desertification Existing studies lack research on water–soil–vegetation typical areas, especially shallow groundwater I...