No abstract

More than half of the solar energy absorbed by land surfaces is currently used to evaporate water(1). Climate change is expected to intensify the hydrological cycle(2) and to alter evapotranspiration, with implications for ecosystem services and feedback to regional and global climate. Evapotranspiration changes may already be under way, but direct observational constraints are lacking at the global scale. Until such evidence is available, changes in the water cycle on land-a key diagnostic criterion of the effects of climate change and variability-remain uncertain. Here we provide a data-driven estimate of global land evapotranspiration from 1982 to 2008, compiled using a global monitoring network(3), meteorological and remote-sensing observations, and a machine-learning algorithm(4). In addition, we have assessed evapotranspiration variations over the same time period using an ensemble of process-based land-surface-models. Our results suggest that global annual evapotranspiration increased on average by 7.1 +/- 1.0 millimetres per year per decade from 1982 to 1997. After that, coincident with the last major El Nino event in 1998, the global evapotranspiration increase seems to have ceased until 2008. This change was driven primarily by moisture limitation in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly Africa and Australia. In these regions, microwave satellite observations indicate that soil moisture decreased from 1998 to 2008. Hence, increasing soil-moisture limitations on evapotranspiration largely explain the recent decline of the global land-evapotranspiration trend. Whether the changing behaviour of evapotranspiration is representative of natural climate variability or reflects a more permanent reorganization of the land water cycle is a key question for earth system science

Understanding the variability of the terrestrial hydrologic cycle is central to determining the potential for extreme events and susceptibility to future change. In the absence of long-term, large-scale observations of the components of the hydrologic cycle, modeling can provide consistent fields of land surface fluxes and states. This paper describes the creation of a global, 50-yr, 3-hourly, 1.0° dataset of meteorological forcings that can be used to drive models of land surface hydrology. The dataset is constructed by combining a suite of global observation-based datasets with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP–NCAR) reanalysis. Known biases in the reanalysis precipitation and near-surface meteorology have been shown to exert an erroneous effect on modeled land surface water and energy budgets and are thus corrected using observation-based datasets of precipitation, air temperature, and radiation. Corrections are also made to the rain day statistics of the reanalysis precipitation, which have been found to exhibit a spurious wavelike pattern in high-latitude wintertime. Wind-induced undercatch of solid precipitation is removed using the results from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Solid Precipitation Measurement Intercomparison. Precipitation is disaggregated in space to 1.0° by statistical downscaling using relationships developed with the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) daily product. Disaggregation in time from daily to 3 hourly is accomplished similarly, using the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3-hourly real-time dataset. Other meteorological variables (downward short- and longwave radiation, specific humidity, surface air pressure, and wind speed) are downscaled in space while accounting for changes in elevation. The dataset is evaluated against the bias-corrected forcing dataset of the second Global Soil Wetness Project (GSWP2). The final product provides a long-term, globally consistent dataset of near-surface meteorological variables that can be used to drive models of the terrestrial hydrologic and ecological processes for the study of seasonal and interannual variability and for the evaluation of coupled models and other land surface prediction schemes.

Drought is expected to increase in frequency and severity in the future as a result of climate change, mainly as a consequence of decreases in regional precipitation but also because of increasing evaporation driven by global warming. Previous assessments of historic changes in drought over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries indicate that this may already be happening globally. In particular, calculations of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) show a decrease in moisture globally since the 1970s with a commensurate increase in the area in drought that is attributed, in part, to global warming. The simplicity of the PDSI, which is calculated from a simple water-balance model forced by monthly precipitation and temperature data, makes it an attractive tool in large-scale drought assessments, but may give biased results in the context of climate change. Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated because the PDSI uses a simplified model of potential evaporation that responds only to changes in temperature and thus responds incorrectly to global warming in recent decades. More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years. The results have implications for how we interpret the impact of global warming on the hydrological cycle and its extremes, and may help to explain why palaeoclimate drought reconstructions based on tree-ring data diverge from the PDSI-based drought record in recent years.

[1] Results are presented from the multi-institution partnership to develop a real-time and retrospective North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS). NLDAS consists of (1) four land models executing in parallel in uncoupled mode, (2) common hourly surface forcing, and (3) common streamflow routing: all using a 1/8°grid over the continental United States. The initiative is largely sponsored by the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Continental-Scale International Project (GCIP). As the overview for nine NLDAS papers, this paper describes and evaluates the 3-year NLDAS execution of 1 October 1996 to 30 September 1999, a period rich in observations for validation. The validation emphasizes (1) the land states, fluxes, and input forcing of four land models, (2) the application of new GCIP-sponsored products, and (3) a multiscale approach. The validation includes (1) mesoscale observing networks of land surface forcing, fluxes, and states, (2) regional snowpack measurements, (3) daily streamflow measurements, and (4) satellite-based retrievals of snow cover, land surface skin temperature (LST), and surface insolation. The results show substantial intermodel differences in surface evaporation and runoff (especially over nonsparse vegetation), soil moisture storage, snowpack, and LST. Owing to surprisingly large intermodel differences in aerodynamic conductance, intermodel differences in midday summer LST were unlike those expected from the intermodel differences in Bowen ratio. Last, anticipating future assimilation of LST, an NLDAS effort unique to this overview paper assesses geostationary-satellite-derived LST, determines the latter to be of good quality, and applies the latter to validate modeled LST.