Multisensor historical climatology of satellite‐derived global land surface moisture

Owe, Manfred; Jeu, Richard de; Holmes, Thomas

doi:10.1029/2007jf000769

Cited by 861 publications

(741 citation statements)

References 48 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

724

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission's (TRMM) microwave imager currently yields the longest high-quality record of surface soil moisture since 1998 (ref. 15). The TRMM imaging area is confined to latitudes between 38u S and 38u N, but covers the regions in which the largest ET-trend changes occurred.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent decline in the global land evapotranspiration trend due to limited moisture supply

Jung

Reichstein

Ciais

et al. 2010

Nature

Self Cite

1,910

1,462

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent decline in the global land evapotranspiration trend due to limited moisture supply

Jung

Reichstein

Ciais

et al. 2010

Nature

Self Cite

1,910

1,462

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…de Jeu et al, 2008;Wagner et al, 2007] and some data products combining the information of multiple sensors extend as far back as the late 1970s [e.g. Owe et al, 2008]. However, microwave based soil moisture estimates have a relatively large uncertainty in regions with high vegetation density [e.g.…”

Section: Terrestrial Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial cross‐correlation patterns of European low, mean and high flows

Gudmundsson¹,

Tallaksen²,

Stahl³

2011

Hydrological Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Low and high flows are associated with different hydrological processes. High flows correspond to the direct response of catchments to water input, whereas low flows occur in pronged dry periods and are governed by depleting storages. Therefore, the inter‐annual dynamics of high and low flows are often considered to be independent. To shed light on this assumption, we analysed a pan‐European dataset of 615 streamflow records, summarized as time series of annual streamflow percentiles (5th, 10th, …, 95th). The analysis was based on comparing the spatial cross‐correlation patterns derived from the different percentile series. Their interrelation was visualized by projecting them into a low‐dimensional space. We found that large parts of the cross‐correlations of the percentile series can be summarized by one dominating component. This component represents geographical continuous regions in Europe of correlated streamflow. Departures from this mean pattern occurred for low and high flows and were characterized by the corresponding spatial correlation functions. Generally, spatial correlations appear to be stronger for high flows than for mean flows, particularly for short distances (<400 km). Low flows, on the other hand, have the lowest spatial correlations for short distances. For longer distances (>800 km), this pattern reverses and the spatial correlation of low flows become largest. This discrepancy between low and high flows suggests that hydrological systems are more homogeneously linked to climatic fluctuations under wet conditions. Under dry conditions, local catchment properties appear to play a larger role in translating climatic fluctuations into hydrological response. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

show abstract

“…For the study period of 2000 to 2006, the CCI-SM data are based on passive microwave observations (i.e. DMSP SSM/I, TRMM TMI, Aqua AMSR-E and Coriolis WindSat; Owe et al, 2008), whereas the active data products are based on observations from the C-band scatterometers on board of the ERS-1 and ERS-2 (Wagner et al, 2013;Bartalis et al, 2007) satellites. In this product, the absolute soil moisture was re-scaled against the 0.25° land surface modeling soil moisture (GLDAS-NOAH, Rodell et al, 2004) using cumulative density function matching.…”

Section: Esa CCI Microwave Soil Moisturementioning

confidence: 99%

Improving soil moisture and runoff simulations over Europe using a high-resolution data-assimilation modeling framework

Naz

Kurtz

Montzka

et al. 2018

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Accurate and reliable hydrologic simulations are important for many applications such as water resources management, future water availability projections and predictions of extreme events. However, the accuracy of water balance estimates is limited by the lack of observations at large scales and the uncertainties of model simulations due to errors in model structure and inputs (e.g. hydrologic parameters and atmospheric forcings). In this study, we assimilated 15 ESA CCI soil moisture (SM) information to improve the estimation of continental-scale soil moisture and runoff. The seasons when cross-validated with independent CCI-SM observations. On average, the mean bias in soil moisture was reduced from 0.1 mm 3 /mm 3 in open-loop simulations to 0.004 mm 3 /mm 3 with SM assimilation. The assimilation experiment also shows overall improvements in runoff, particularly during peak runoff. The results demonstrate the potential of assimilating satellite soil moisture observations to improve high-resolution soil moisture and runoff simulations at the continental scale, which is useful for water resources assessment and monitoring. 25

show abstract

Multisensor historical climatology of satellite‐derived global land surface moisture

Cited by 861 publications

References 48 publications

Recent decline in the global land evapotranspiration trend due to limited moisture supply

Recent decline in the global land evapotranspiration trend due to limited moisture supply

Spatial cross‐correlation patterns of European low, mean and high flows

Improving soil moisture and runoff simulations over Europe using a high-resolution data-assimilation modeling framework

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About