Long-term relative decline in evapotranspiration with increasing
runoff on fractional land surfaces

Wang, Ren; Gentine, Pierre; Yin, Jiabo; Chen, Lijuan; Chen, Jianyao; Li, Longhui

doi:10.5194/hess-2020-590

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…These conflicting findings may stem from different interpretations of 'drying', 'aridity' and 'intensification', depending on the metrics and spatial-scale aggregation methods used 4,18 . Changes in the terrestrial hydrological cycle have typically been explored by examining trends in just one 3,5,9,10,[19][20][21] , or a subset 16,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] of its components, or in aridity metrics that do not capture the full complexity of changes 4 . Furthermore, many studies use a single-source dataset, so that results are very sensitive to dataset choice 2,4,24,33 and its inherent uncertainties 4,21 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconciling historical changes in the hydrological cycle over land

et al. 2022

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The sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report confirms that global warming drives widespread changes in the global terrestrial hydrological cycle, and that changes are regionally diverse. However, reported trends and changes in the hydrological cycle suffer from significant inconsistencies. This is associated with the lack of a rigorous observationally-based assessment of simultaneous trends in the different components of the hydrological cycle. Here, we reconcile these different estimates of historical changes by simultaneously analysing trends in all the major components of the hydrological cycle, coupled with vegetation greenness for the period 1980–2012. We use observationally constrained, conserving estimates of the closure of the hydrological cycle, combined with a data assimilation approach and observationally-driven uncertainty estimates. We find robust changes in the hydrological cycle across more than 50% of the land area, with evapotranspiration (ET) changing the most and precipitation (P) the least. We find many instances of unambiguous trends in ET and runoff (Q) without robust trends in P, a result broadly consistent with a “wet gets wetter, but dry does not get drier”. These findings provide important opportunities for water resources management and climate risk assessment over a significant fraction of the land surface where hydrological trends have previously been uncertain.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconciling historical changes in the hydrological cycle over land

et al. 2022

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“…Our results indicate an increase in groundwater recharge during winter if the historical root-zone storage capacity parameter is used, as opposed to a decrease for the models with a time dynamic root-zone storage capacity, as a result of an increased water demand for evaporation during summer. This further emphasizes the major impact of vegetation in regulating the water cycle (Luo et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020;Stephens et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

The importance of ecosystem adaptation on hydrological model predictions in response to climate change

Bouaziz

Aalbers

Weerts

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Abstract. To predict future hydrological behavior in a changing world, often use is made of models calibrated on past observations, disregarding that hydrological systems, hence model parameters, will change as well. Yet, ecosystems likely adjust their root-zone storage capacity, which is the key parameter of any hydrological system, in response to climate change. In addition, other species might become dominant, both under natural and anthropogenic influence. In this study, we propose a top-down approach, which directly uses projected climate data to estimate how vegetation adapts its root-zone storage capacity at the catchment scale in response to changes in magnitude and seasonality of hydro-climatic variables. Additionally, the Budyko characteristics of different dominant ecosystems in sub-catchments are used to simulate the hydrological behavior of potential future land-use change, in a space-for-time exchange. We hypothesize that changes in the predicted hydrological response as a result of 2 K global warming are more pronounced when explicitly considering changes in the sub-surface system properties induced by vegetation adaptation to changing environmental conditions. We test our hypothesis in the Meuse basin in four scenarios designed to predict the hydrological response to 2 K global warming in comparison to current-day conditions using a process-based hydrological model with (a) a stationary system, i.e. no changes in the root-zone storage capacity of vegetation and historical land use, (b) an adapted root-zone storage capacity in response to a changing climate but with historical land use, and (c, d) an adapted root-zone storage capacity considering two hypothetical changes in land use from coniferous plantations/agriculture towards broadleaved forest and vice-versa. We found that the larger root-zone storage capacities (+34 %) in response to a more pronounced seasonality with drier summers under 2 K global warming strongly alter seasonal patterns of the hydrological response, with an overall increase in mean annual evaporation (+4 %), a decrease in recharge (−6 %) and a decrease in streamflow (−7 %), compared to predictions with a stationary system. By integrating a time-dynamic representation of changing vegetation properties in hydrological models, we make a potential step towards more reliable hydrological predictions under change.

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“…The increase trend is especially obvious before 1980s. In addition, the hotspots with increase in drought duration and intensity are consistent with the previous studies documenting drought changes, especially in western North America, the Mediterranean region, the east of Amazon region, north India, and northeast China (Wolf et al ., 2017; Samaniego et al ., 2018; Hao et al ., 2020; Wang et al ., 2021). Therefore, these regions are more necessary to guard against drought risks with climate change.…”

Section: Results Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Respective contributions of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration to long‐term changes in global drought duration and intensity

Wang

Chen

et al. 2022

Intl Journal of Climatology

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Climate change has resulted in an increase in drought in most global land areas, mainly due to a decrease in regional precipitation (P) or an increase in potential evapotranspiration (PET) induced by climate warming. However, knowledge on the contributions of P and PET to long-term changes in global drought duration and intensity is still limited. In this study, we quantitatively analysed the respective contributions of P and PET to long-term drought duration and intensity on a global scale, using standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) and different inputs of P and PET. The results showed that the mean drought duration and intensity experienced an increasing trend in most global land areas during 1950-2020, especially in western United States, eastern Amazon, Mediterranean region, Africa, western Asia, and northeastern Asia. The contributions of P and PET to historical drought evolution vary from regions. The results show that while increasing PET has extensive contribution to drought increase, regional increases in long-term drought duration and intensity are largely determined by the variability in P, and the contribution of P to the increase in long-term drought can even reach 100%. This study has great implications in improving physical understanding of long-term drought evolution under climate change.

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Long-term relative decline in evapotranspiration with increasing runoff on fractional land surfaces

Cited by 5 publications

References 52 publications

Reconciling historical changes in the hydrological cycle over land

Reconciling historical changes in the hydrological cycle over land

The importance of ecosystem adaptation on hydrological model predictions in response to climate change

Respective contributions of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration to long‐term changes in global drought duration and intensity

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