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Afforestation is regarded as the most appropriate approach to control soil erosion (Jia et al., 2017;Porto et al., 2009), but expanding vegetation needs more water to maintain its growth (Huang et al., 2020;Teuling et al., 2019;Q. Wang et al., 2021). Precipitation thus plays a crucial role in the sustainability of afforestation, especially for water-limited areas. Atmospheric moisture is of great relevance to precipitation generation (Payne et al., 2020). There are two sources for atmospheric moisture overlying a land area: the first is external moisture flowing into this area by horizontal advection and the second is internal moisture provided by the local evapotranspiration (ET) (Y. Zhao & Zhou, 2021). The ratio of precipitation transformed from internal recycled moisture to the total precipitation received by this area is defined as the precipitation recycling ratio (PRR) (Holgate et al., 2020), which can serve as an indicator of the intensity of the water cycle (Gao et al., 2020;Trenberth, 1999). Both anthropogenic activities and climate variability affect the transport of atmospheric moisture and its transformation to precipitation (Baudena et al., 2021;Tuinenburg & Staal, 2020). To design science-informed and sustainable policies for afforestation, there is a growing need to explore the response of the atmospheric water cycle to afforestation and climate change.Afforestation alters moisture and energy fluxes interchanged between the atmosphere and land surface by affecting surface characteristics (Baudena et al., 2021;Hagos et al., 2014;. The Loess Plateau (LP) in China is an ideal platform to study the impact of large-scale afforestation on the atmospheric water cycle, since it launched the world's largest afforestation program (Cao et al., 2019), the Grain for Green Program (GFGP) in 1999. With an investment of US$54.57 billion (Bryan et al., 2018), the GFGP has led to a 57% decline

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Land cover change (LCC) is an important perturbation to the global and regional climate, and can alter the climate conditions through both biogeochemical and biogeophysical processes (

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