Empirical evidence of contrasting soil moisture–precipitation feedbacks across the United States
The effects of rainfall on rainfall
Soil moisture, which is controlled in part by past rainfall, can affect the probability of future rainfall over large areas. This is because the water contained in soils helps determine how sunlight is converted into latent heat (evaporation) and sensible heat (which increases overlying air temperatures). Tuttle and Salvucci used data collected for the contiguous United States over 10 years to study this relationship. The feedback between soil moisture and rainfall is generally positive in the western United States but negative in the east. This regional dependence could be a function of large-scale differences in aridity.
Science, this issue p. 825
Abstract
Soil moisture influences fluxes of heat and moisture originating at the land surface, thus altering atmospheric humidity and temperature profiles. However, empirical and modeling studies disagree on how this affects the propensity for precipitation, mainly owing to the difficulty in establishing causality. We use Granger causality to estimate the relationship between soil moisture and occurrence of subsequent precipitation over the contiguous United States using remotely sensed soil moisture and gauge-based precipitation observations. After removing potential confounding effects of daily persistence, and seasonal and interannual variability in precipitation, we find that soil moisture anomalies significantly influence rainfall probabilities over 38% of the area with a median factor of 13%. The feedback is generally positive in the west and negative in the east, suggesting dependence on regional aridity.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S8
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Published In
Science
Volume 352 | Issue 6287
13 May 2016
13 May 2016
Copyright
Copyright © 2016, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 18 January 2015
Accepted: 4 April 2016
Published in print: 13 May 2016
Acknowledgments
Thanks to P. Dirmeyer and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments that helped to strengthen this analysis. The data used in this study are freely available online from the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC) (http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/hydrology), the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) (http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0451), and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) DAAC for biogeochemical dynamics (https://daac.ornl.gov/NACP/guides/NBCD_2000_V2.html). This research was funded by NASA under grant NNX12AP78G (to G.S.).
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