Global land moisture trends: drier in dry and wetter in wet over land

Global land moisture trends: drier in dry and wetter in wet over land

The "dry gets drier, wet gets wetter" (DGDWGW) paradigm is widely accepted in global moisture change. However, Greve et al. have declared that this paradigm has been overestimated. This controversy leaves a large gap in the understanding of the evolution of water-related processes. Here, we examine the global moisture trends using satellite soil moisture for the past 35 years (1979-2013). Our r...

The Response of Precipitation Minus Evapotranspiration to Climate Warming: Why the “Wet-Get-Wetter, Dry-Get- Drier” Scaling Does Not Hold over Land

Simulations with climate models show a land–ocean contrast in the response of P2 E (precipitation minus evaporation or evapotranspiration) to global warming, with larger changes over ocean than over land. The changes over ocean broadly follow a simple thermodynamic scaling of the atmospheric moisture convergence: the so-called ‘‘wet-get-wetter, dry-get-drier’’ mechanism. Over land, however, the...

Revisiting trends in wetness and dryness in the presence of internal climate variability and water limitations over land

A theoretically expected consequence of the intensification of the hydrological cycle under global warming is that on average, wet regions get wetter and dry regions get drier (WWDD). Recent studies, however, have found significant discrepancies between the expected pattern of change and observed changes over land. We assess the WWDD theory in four climate models. We find that the reported disc...

Influences of Biomass Burning on Land-atmosphere Interactions and Dry-to-wet Transition over Amazonia

Land - Use and Land - Cover Trends in the Upper Midwest

Land use can be defined as the values that humans obtain from landscapes. What is it that people are actually doing on the landscape? Though remote sensing is often used for mapping land use and land cover over large areas, to actually map land use usually requires some careful human interpretation of the imagery or, better, surveying or interviewing people on the ground to identify their use o...