Response of evapotranspiration and water availability to the changing climate in Northern Eurasia

Yaling Liu (), Qianlai Zhuang, Zhihua Pan, Diego Miralles, Nadja Tchebakova, David Kicklighter, Jiquan Chen, Andrey Sirin, Yujie He, Guangsheng Zhou and Jerry Melillo

Climatic Change, 2014, vol. 126, issue 3, 413-427

Abstract: Northern Eurasian ecosystems play an important role in the global climate system. Northern Eurasia (NE) has experienced dramatic climate changes during the last half of the 20th century and to present. To date, how evapotranspiration (ET) and water availability (P–ET, P: precipitation) had changed in response to the climatic change in this region has not been well evaluated. This study uses an improved version of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (TEM) that explicitly considers ET from uplands, wetlands, water bodies and snow cover to examine temporal and spatial variations in ET, water availability and river discharge in NE for the period 1948–2009. The average ET over NE increased during the study period at a rate of 0.13 mm year −1 year −1 . Over this time, water availability augmented in the western part of the region, but decreased in the eastern part. The consideration of snow sublimation substantially improved the ET estimates and highlighted the importance of snow in the hydrometeorology of NE. We also find that the modified TEM estimates of water availability in NE watersheds are in good agreement with corresponding measurements of historical river discharge before 1970. However, a systematic underestimation of river discharge occurs after 1970 indicates that other water sources or dynamics not considered by the model (e.g., melting glaciers, permafrost thawing and fires) may also be important for the hydrology of the region. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-014-1234-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:126:y:2014:i:3:p:413-427

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-014-1234-9

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().