Soil moisture–atmosphere feedbacks mitigate declining water availability in drylands

Sha Zhou (), A. Park Williams, Benjamin R. Lintner, Alexis M. Berg, Yao Zhang, Trevor F. Keenan, Benjamin I. Cook, Stefan Hagemann, Sonia I. Seneviratne and Pierre Gentine
Additional contact information
Sha Zhou: Columbia University
A. Park Williams: Columbia University
Benjamin R. Lintner: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Alexis M. Berg: Harvard University
Yao Zhang: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Trevor F. Keenan: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Benjamin I. Cook: Columbia University
Stefan Hagemann: Institute of Coastal Research
Sonia I. Seneviratne: ETH Zurich
Pierre Gentine: Columbia University

Nature Climate Change, 2021, vol. 11, issue 1, 38-44

Abstract: Abstract Global warming alters surface water availability (precipitation minus evapotranspiration, P–E) and hence freshwater resources. However, the influence of land–atmosphere feedbacks on future P–E changes and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here we demonstrate that soil moisture (SM) strongly impacts future P–E changes, especially in drylands, by regulating evapotranspiration and atmospheric moisture inflow. Using modelling and empirical approaches, we find a consistent negative SM feedback on P–E, which may offset ~60% of the decline in dryland P–E otherwise expected in the absence of SM feedbacks. The negative feedback is not caused by atmospheric thermodynamic responses to declining SM; rather, reduced SM, in addition to limiting evapotranspiration, regulates atmospheric circulation and vertical ascent to enhance moisture transport into drylands. This SM effect is a large source of uncertainty in projected dryland P–E changes, underscoring the need to better constrain future SM changes and improve the representation of SM–atmosphere processes in models.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00945-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:natcli:v:11:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41558-020-00945-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-020-00945-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

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