The Loess Plateau of China has the highest soil erosion rate in the world where billion tons of soil is annually washed into Yellow River. In recent decades this region has experienced significant climate change and policy-driven land conversion. However, it has not yet been well investigated how these changes in climate and land use have affected soil organic carbon (SOC) storage on the Loess ...

Soil moisture is an essential climate variable (ECV) of major importance for land–atmosphere interactions and global hydrology. An appropriate representation of soil moisture dynamics in global climate models is therefore important. Recently, a first multidecadal, observation-based soil moisture dataset has become available that provides information on soil moisture dynamics from satellite obse...

In a partial factorial model experiment, we used the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (TEM, version 4.0) to assess the relative roles of changes in CO2, temperature, precipitation and cloudiness in equilibrium responses of primary production and carbon storage. In the experiment, we used two levels of atmospheric CO2 concentration (315 and 522 ppmv CO2), contemporary climate and changes in temperatu...

BACKGROUND To identify potential environmental drivers of Japanese Encephalitis virus (JE) transmission in Nepal, we conducted an ecological study to determine the spatial association between 2005 Nepal JE incidence, and climate, agricultural, and land-cover variables at district level. METHODS District-level data on JE cases were examined using Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) ...

Taking the Guangxi Beibu Gulf Economic Zone as the study area, this paper utilizes the geographical detector model to quantify the feedback effects from the terrestrial environment on precipitation variation from 1985 to 2010 with a comprehensive consideration of natural factors (forest coverage rate, vegetation type, terrain, terrestrial ecosystem types, land use and land cover change) and soc...

Terrestrial vegetation exerts an important influence on climate variability via the exchange of mass, energy, and momentum between the land surface and the atmosphere. This dissertation uses statistical techniques and stochastic models to investigate largescale vegetation/climate interactions in remotely-sensed vegetation datasets and observational climate records. Vegetation feedbacks on clima...

The land use of the Great Lakes region has changed significantly during historical times, and continues to change. As a preliminary step in investigating the overall effect that this might have on climate, attention is focused here on one forcing factor and one effect—land surface roughness length and lake effect precipitation, respectively—that are anticipated to be particularly sensitive piec...

Albedo plays an important role in land–atmosphere interactions and local climate. This study presents the impact on simulating regional climate, and the evolution of a drought, when using the default climatological albedo as is usually done in regional climate modelling, or using the actual observed albedo which is rarely done. Here, timevarying satellite derived albedo data is used to update t...

The climate of the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) has been simulated using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. WRF was implemented using a 10km horizontal grid and integrated for 24 years from 1985 through 2008. The model simulated climate was evaluated against gridded precipitation and temperature observations from the Australian Water Availability Project (AWAP) and found to perform...

Grasslands occupy nearly three quarters of the land surface of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau (QTP) and play a critical role in regulating the ecological functions of the QTP. Ongoing climate change and human interference have greatly affected grasslands on the QTP. Differentiating human-induced and climate-driven vegetation changes is vital for both ecological understanding and the management of hu...