Relevance of near-surface soil moisture vs. terrestrial water storage for global vegetation functioning

Khanal, Prajwal; Hoek Van Dijke, Anne J.; Schaffhauser, Timo; Li, Wantong; Paulus, Sinikka J.; Zhan, Chunhui; Orth, René

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-1533-2024

Articles | Volume 21, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-1533-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-1533-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 6

Research article

|

22 Mar 2024

Research article |

| 22 Mar 2024

Relevance of near-surface soil moisture vs. terrestrial water storage for global vegetation functioning

Prajwal Khanal, Anne J. Hoek Van Dijke, Timo Schaffhauser, Wantong Li, Sinikka J. Paulus, Chunhui Zhan, and René Orth

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-1533-2024-supplement

Data sets

MODIS/Terra Vegetation Indices 16-Day L3 Global 0.05Deg CMG V061 K. Didan https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD13C1.061

ESA Soil Moisture Climate Change Initiative (Soil_Moisture_cci): Version 08.1 data collection W. Dorigo et al. http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/ff890589c21f4033803aa550f52c980c

ERA5-Land hourly data from 1950 to present J. Muñoz Sabater https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.e2161bac

Vegetation Continuous Fields (VCF) Yearly Global 0.05 Deg M. Hansen and X. Song https://doi.org/10.5067/MEaSUREs/VCF/VCF5KYR.001

Historical Irrigation Dataset (HID) S. Siebert et al. https://doi.org/10.13019/M20599

A linear method for the retrieval of sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence from GOME-2 and SCIAMACHY data (https://www.gfz-potsdam.de/sektion/fernerkundung-und-geoinformatik/projekte/global-monitoring-of-vegetation-fluorescence-globfluo/daten) P. Köhler et al. https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-8-2589-2015

JPL GRACE Mascon Ocean, Ice, and Hydrology Equivalent Water Height Release 06 Coastal Resolution Improvement (CRI) Filtered Version 1.0. Ver. 1.0 D. N. Wiese et al. https://doi.org/10.5067/TEMSC-3MJC6

Land Cover CCI Product User Guide Version 2 (https://www.esa-landcover-cci.org/) ESA https://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer/download/ESACCI-LC-Ph2-PUGv2_2.0.pdf

A suite of global, cross-scale topographic variables for environmental and biodiversity modeling (https://www.earthenv.org/topography) G. Amatulli et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2018.40

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Short summary

Water availability is essential for vegetation functioning, but the depth of vegetation water uptake is largely unknown due to sparse ground measurements. This study correlates vegetation growth with soil moisture availability globally to infer vegetation water uptake depth using only satellite-based data. We find that the vegetation water uptake depth varies across climate regimes and vegetation types and also changes during dry months at a global scale.