Triggers of summertime convective rainfall depend on numerous interactions and feedbacks, often compounded by spatial variability in soil moisture and its impacts on vegetation function, vegetation composition, terrain, and all the complex turbulent entrainment processes near the capping inversion. To progress even within the most restricted and idealized framework, many of the governing proces...

Inland saline wetlands are complex systems undergoing continuous changes in moisture and salinity and are especially vulnerable to human pressures. Remote sensing is helpful to identify vegetation change in semi-arid wetlands and to assess wetland degradation. Remote sensing-based monitoring requires identification of the spectral characteristics of soils and vegetation and their correspondence...

The objective of this study was to analyze the sensitivity of radar signals in the X-band in irrigated grassland conditions. The backscattered radar signals were analyzed according to soil moisture and vegetation parameters using linear regression models. A time series of radar (TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed) and optical (SPOT and LANDSAT) images was acquired at a high temporal frequency in 2013 ...

Soil moisture supply and atmospheric demand for water independently limit—and profoundly a ect—vegetation productivity and water use during periods of hydrologic stress1–4. Disentangling the impact of these two drivers on ecosystem carbon and water cycling is di cult because they are often correlated, and experimental tools for manipulating atmospheric demand in the field are lacking. Consequen...

Grassland salinization causes considerable changes to soil and vegetation, which can lead to changes in soil organic carbon (C) and total nitrogen (N). These changes have complex causal relationships. A significant correlation between soil organic C and total N and any soil or vegetation property does not necessarily imply a significant direct effect of the property on soil organic C and total ...

Multitemporal processing of synthetic aperture radar imagery, e.g. for the extraction of a soil moisture index, requires normalization of acquisitions from different locations in space to a common incidence angle. Incidence angle dependence of backscatter is known to depend on the amount of aboveground vegetation, and can thus be expected to vary seasonally as a result of vegetation phenology. ...

Climate change will result in reduced soil water availability in much of the world either due to changes in precipitation or increased temperature and evapotranspiration. How communities of mites and nematodes may respond to changes in moisture availability is not well known, yet these organisms play important roles in decomposition and nutrient cycling processes. We determined how communities ...

This study addresses the issue of the variability and heterogeneity problems that are expected from a sensor with a larger footprint having homogenous and heterogeneous sub-pixels. Improved understanding of spatial variability of soil surface characteristics such as land cover and vegetation in larger footprint are critical in remote sensing based soil moisture retrieval. This study analyzes th...

In seasonally dry climates, a distinct rainy season is followed by a pronounced dry season during which rainfall often makes a negligible contribution to soil moisture. Using stochastic analytical models of soil moisture to represent the effects of this seasonal change has been hindered by the need to mathematically represent the stochastic influence of wet season climate on dry season soil wat...

In this paper, the coupled WRF/SSiB model, accompanied by a Karst Rocky Desertification (KRD) map of the Guizhou Karst Plateau (GKP) of China, was applied to detect how the changed vegetation and soil characteristics over the GKP modify the energy balance at the land surface. The results indicated that land degradation led to reduced net radiation by inducing more upward shortwave and longwave ...