Understanding the effects of increasing temperature is central in explaining the effects of climate change on vegetation. Here, we investigate how warming affects vegetation regeneration and root biomass and if there is an interactive effect of warming with other environmental variables. We also examine if geothermal warming effects on vegetation regeneration and root biomass can be used in cli...

Using a fully coupled climate–terrestrial ecosystem model, we demonstrate explicitly that an initial perturbation on vegetation induces not only a direct positive vegetation feedback, but also a significant indirect vegetation–soil moisture feedback. The indirect feedback is generated through either fractional cover change or soil moisture depletion. Both indirect feedback mechanisms are trigge...

The description of soil moisture dynamics is a challenging problem for the hydrological community, as it is governed by complex interactions between climate, soil and vegetation. Recent research has achieved significant advances in the description of temporal dynamics of soil water balance through the use of a stochastic differential equation proposed by Laio et al. (2001). The assumptions of t...

In this paper, SSiB's development and some of its major parameterizations in the model are briefly reviewed. The soil moisture parameterizations, which are a key element in the model, are comprehensively described. The sensitivity study shows that hydraulic conductivity at saturation, B parameter, and wilting point have a profound impact on the simulation of soil moisture, hut with different fe...

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...

[1] Soil moisture is the environmental variable synthesizing the effect of climate, soil, and vegetation on the dynamics of water-limited ecosystems. Unlike abiotic factors (e.g., soil texture and rainfall regime), the control exerted by vegetation composition and structure on soil moisture variability remains poorly understood. A number of field studies in dryland landscapes have found higher ...

Recent warming has stimulated the productivity of boreal and Arctic vegetation by reducing temperature limitations. However, several studies have hypothesized that warming may have also increased moisture limitations because of intensified summer drought severity. Establishing the connections between warming and drought stress has been difficult because soil moisture observations are scarce. He...

Active microwave remote sensing observations hold the potential for efficient and reliable mapping of spatial soil moisture distributions. However, soil moisture retrievals from microwave remote sensing techniques are typically complex because of the inherent difficulty in characterizing the interactions among land surface parameters that contribute to the retrieval process. Therefore adequate ...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is an important component of the hydrologic budget because it expresses the exchange of mass and energy between the soil-water-vegetation system and the atmosphere. Prevailing weather conditions influence potential or reference ET through variables such as radiation, temperature, wind, and relativity humidity. In addition to these weather variables, actual ET (ETa) is al...

Accurate soil moisture content measurements are vital to precision irrigation management. Remote sensing using the microwave spectrum (such as GPS signals) has been used for measuring large area soil moisture contents. In our previous work, we estimated surface soil moisture contents for bare soil using a GPS Delay Mapping Receiver (DMR) developed by NASA. However, the effect of vegetation was ...