[1] The radar backscattering coefficient is mainly determined by surface soil moisture, vegetation and land surface roughness under a given configuration of the satellite sensor. It is observed that the temporal variations of the three variables are different, the variation of vegetation and roughness are at the longer temporal scales corresponding to climate and cultivation practices, while so...

[1] Soil moisture trends, particularly during the growing season, are an important possible consequence of global warming. Climate model simulations of future soil moisture changes should be made with models that can produce reliable simulations of soil moisture for past climate changes. In this paper, we compare soil moisture simulations from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth As...

The variance budget of land surface hydrological quantities is analyzed in the second Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP2) simulation made with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma) third-generation general circulation model (AGCM3). The land surface parameterization in this model is the comparatively sophisticated Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS). Seco...

Soil moisture gradients along hillslopes in humid watersheds, although indicated by vegetation gradients and by studies using models, have been difficult to confirm empirically. While soil properties and topographic features are the two general physiographic factors controlling soil moisture on hillslopes, studies have shown conflicting results regarding which factor is more important. The rela...

Comparisons to ground-based surface soil moisture estimates are necessary to evaluate the capability of remote sensors to determine soil moisture and its spatiotemporal variability. Soil moisture can be especially variable in regions of complex terrain which exhibit large variations in vegetation, soil properties and hydrologic conditions. The objective of this study is to evaluate the spatiote...

High-altitude and alpine areas are predicted to experience rapid and substantial increases in future temperature, which may have serious impacts on soil carbon, nutrient and soil fauna. Here we report the impact of 20 years of experimental warming on soil properties and soil mites in three contrasting plant communities in alpine/subarctic Sweden. Long-term warming decreased juvenile oribatid mi...

The combined effect of soil moisture in unsaturated soil layers and pore-water pressure in saturated soil layers is critical to predict landslides. An improved infinite slope stability model, that directly includes unsaturated zone soil moisture and groundwater, is derived and used to analyze the factor of safety’s sensitivity to unsaturated zone soil moisture. This sensitivity, the change in t...

A key state variable in land surface–atmosphere interactions is soil moisture, which affects surface energy fluxes, runoff and the radiation balance. Soil moisture modelling relies on parameter estimates that are inadequately measured at the necessarily fine model scales. Hence, model soil moisture estimates are imperfect and often drift away from reality through simulation time. Because of its...

Current models for seasonal climate prediction are limited due to poor initialization of the land surface soil moisture states. Passive microwave remote sensing provides quantitative information on soil moisture in a thin near-surface soil layer at large scale. This information can be integrated with a land surface process model through data assimilation to give better prediction of the near su...