Land‐Atmosphere Drivers of Landscape‐Scale Plant Water Content Loss
Name
2020GL090331.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.79 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1c561c2ad8c8a600d621e66a97020ea2
Author(s)
Feldman, Andrew F
Short Gianotti, Daniel J
Trigo, Isabel F
Salvucci, Guido D
Entekhabi, Dara
Date Issued
November 2020
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Citation
Feldman, A. F., Short Gianotti, D. J.,Trigo, I. F., Salvucci, G. D.,& Entekhabi, D. (2020).Land-atmosphere drivers of landscape-scale plant water content loss. Geophysical Research Letters, 47
Version
Final published version
Abstract
©2020. The Authors. Plant water content observations using microwave remote sensing measurements allow monitoring of landscape-scale plant water stress. During soil drying following rainfall events, we use a Granger causality framework to quantify the degree to which environmental factors drive satellite-based plant water content loss across Africa's diverse biomes. After soil drying into the water-limited regime, satellite observations show that plants dry while solar radiation, vapor pressure deficit, and diurnal temperature amplitude increase. We find that soil drying primarily drives plant water content loss across African drylands, though with regional effects of diurnal temperature amplitude increases (found to indicate vapor pressure deficit increases here). We also detect interactions between these factors that reinforce plant drying during periods of soil moisture loss. Our results provide observational evidence across Africa that individual and interactive components of surface drying and heating can all drive plant water stress, especially during intermittent poststorm drying periods.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL090331
