0000000000069780

AUTHOR

Anna Sörensson

Spatio-temporal soil drying in southeastern South America: the importance of effective sampling frequency and observational errors on drydown time scale estimates

The study of the spatio-temporal dynamics of surface soil moisture (SSM) drydowns integrates the soil response to climatic conditions, drainage and land cover and is key to advances in our knowledg...

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Quantifying the spatial extent and intensity of recent extreme drought events in the Amazon rainforest and their impacts on the carbon cycle

Over the last decades, the Amazon rainforest was hit by multiple severe drought events. Here we assess the severity and spatial extent of the extreme drought years 2005, 2010, and 2015/2016 in the Amazon region and their impacts on the carbon cycle. As an indicator of drought stress in the Amazon rainforest, we use the widely applied maximum cumulative water deficit (ΔMCWD). Evaluating an ensemble of ten state-of-the-art precipitation datasets for the Amazon region, we find that the spatial extent of the drought in 2005 ranges from 2.8 to 4.2 (mean = 3.2) million km2 (46–71 % of the Amazon basin, mean = 53 %) where ΔMCWD indicates at le…

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Seasonal Analysis of Surface Soil Moisture Dry-Downs in a Land-Atmosphere Hotspot as Seen by LSM and Satellite Products

The soil drying process is a challenging framework to assess climatic, hydrologic and ecosystem processes. This work develops a seasonal analysis of temporal e-folding decay ( $\tau$ ) of surface soil moisture dry-downs using ORCHIDEE land surface model and SMOS observations over South Eastern South America (SESA). Results show that the soil drying process depends on both location and season, and that the modeled drying velocity is faster than the observed one, even when modeled data is sampled at the same frequency as the observations. Differences between observed and modeled data have been found both in the analysis of the regional overall $\tau$ and in the spatial patterns of $\tau$ esti…

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