Global Patterns of Vegetation Response to Short-Term Surface Water Availability
Name
Global_Patterns_of_Vegetation_Response_to_Short-Term_Surface_Water_Availability.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.36 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
fcb9d72ca731f15e91786b74477248ed
Author(s)
He, Qing
Lu, Hui
Yang, Kun
Zhen, Ling
Yue, Siyu
Li, Yishan
Entekhabi, Dara
Date Issued
August 2021
Journal
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Q. He et al., "Global Patterns of Vegetation Response to Short-Term Surface Water Availability," in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, vol. 14, pp. 8273-8286, 2021
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Terrestrial vegetation response to surface water availability is important for land–atmosphere interactions. However, the current understanding of how the vegetation responds to surface water remains limited since the physical processes happening within the biosphere and hydrosphere are highly coupled. It is even more difficult to measure such interactions for the processes related to surface soil moisture (SSM)—the central variable that interacts the most intimately with vegetation—since the observations of SSM are often scarce and uneven. Here, we use the satellite observations of vegetation optical depth (VOD) and SSM to map the response time scales of vegetation to surface water anomalies. We use the stability theory to derive vegetation memory time ( τReS ) to reveal the global pattern of vegetation memory to surface water anomalies. That is, the time vegetation takes to return back to its equilibrium when an anomaly dissipates to a certain level (e.g., the e-folding level). We also estimate the plant reactive time ( τReA )—the time when impacts of surface anomaly reach its peak to evaluate the overall resilience of terrestrial vegetation to surface water anomalies. The results show that τReS tends to be longer in herbaceous biomes, whereas τReA is longer in biomes with tree cover. Such anticorrelation of τReS and τReA indicates that the herbaceous biomes may be more vulnerable to surface water perturbations during climate extremes. Our study provides a global quantification on vegetation—soil moisture feedbacks—enabling comparison with earth system models.
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/10.1109/jstars.2021.3103854
