At shorter time scales, heterogeneous patterns in precipitation drive spatial variability in soil moisture, which potentially impacts hydrologic responses from future storm events.\n As seen in ...recent experiments in the Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, lengthening of the growing season significantly alters the seasonal timing of groundwater extraction and canopy fluxes of moisture and carbon.
The movement of moisture into, out‐of, and within forest ecosystems is modulated by feedbacks that stem from processes which couple plants, soil, and the atmosphere. While an understanding of these ...processes has been gleaned from Eddy Covariance techniques, the reliability of the method suffers at night because of weak turbulence. During the summer of 2011, continuous profiles of the isotopic composition (i.e., δ18O and δD) of water vapor and periodic measurements of soil, leaf, and precipitation pools were measured in an open‐canopy ponderosa pine forest in central Colorado to study within‐canopy nocturnal water cycling. The isotopic composition of the nocturnal water vapor varies significantly based on the relative contributions of the three major hydrological processes acting on the forest: dewfall, exchange of moisture between leaf waters and canopy vapor, and periodic mixing between the canopy and background air. Dewfall proved to be surprisingly common (∼30% of the nights) and detectable on both the surface and within the canopy through the isotopic measurements. While surface dew could be observed using leaf wetness and soil moisture sensors, dew in the foliage was only measurable through isotopic analysis of the vapor and often occurred even when no dew accumulated on the surface. Nocturnal moisture cycling plays a critical role in water availability in forest ecosystems through foliar absorption and transpiration, and assessing these dynamics, as done here, is necessary for fully characterizing the hydrological controls on terrestrial productivity.
Key Points
Profiles of isotope ratio of H2O(v) yield new insight on nocturnal water cycling
Dew is a critical source of bio‐available water and effects latent heat budget
Deuterium‐excess of water vapor clearly tags canopy‐influenced moisture
We applied the newly developed WRF-Hydro model to investigate the hydroclimatic trend encompassing the three basins in Southwest Louisiana as well as their connection with large-scale atmospheric ...drivers. Using the North American Land Data Assimilation System Phase 2 (NLDAS-2), we performed a multi-decadal model hindcast covering the period of 1979–2014. After validating the model’s performance against available observations, trend and wavelet analysis were applied on the time series of hydroclimatic variables from NLDAS-2 (temperature and precipitation) and model results (evapotranspiration, soil moisture, water surplus, and streamflow). Trend analysis of model-simulated monthly and annual time series indicates that the regional climate is warming and drying over the past decades, specifically during spring and summer (growing season). Wavelet analysis reveals that, since the late 1990s, the anomaly of evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and streamflow exhibits high coherency with that of precipitation. Pettitt’s test detects a possible change-point around the year 2004, after which the monthly precipitation decreased from 140 to 120 mm, evapotranspiration slightly increased from 80 to 83 mm, and water surplus decreased from 60 to 38 mm. Changes in regional climate conditions are closely correlated with large-scale climate dynamics such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
Abstract A unique, high-resolution, hydroclimate reanalysis, 40-plus-year (October 1979–September 2021), 4 km (named as CONUS404), has been created using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model by ...dynamically downscaling of the fifth-generation European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate dataset (ERA5) over the conterminous United States. The paper describes the approach for generating the dataset, provides an initial evaluation, including biases, and indicates how interested users can access the data. The motivation for creating this National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)–U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) collaborative dataset is to provide research and end-user communities with a high-resolution, self-consistent, long-term, continental-scale hydroclimate dataset appropriate for forcing hydrological models and conducting hydroclimate scientific analyses over the conterminous United States. The data are archived and accessible on the USGS Black Pearl tape system and on the NCAR supercomputer Campaign storage system.
The Bio-hydro-atmosphere interactions of Energy, Aerosols, Carbon, H2O, Organics & Nitrogen (BEACHON) project seeks to understand the feedbacks and inter-relationships between hydrology, biogenic ...emissions, carbon assimilation, aerosol properties, clouds and associated feedbacks within water-limited ecosystems. The Manitou Experimental Forest Observatory (MEFO) was established in 2008 by the National Center for Atmospheric Research to address many of the BEACHON research objectives, and it now provides a fixed field site with significant infrastructure. MEFO is a mountainous, semi-arid ponderosa pine-dominated forest site that is normally dominated by clean continental air but is periodically influenced by anthropogenic sources from Colorado Front Range cities. This article summarizes the past and ongoing research activities at the site, and highlights some of the significant findings that have resulted from these measurements. These activities include - soil property measurements; - hydrological studies; - measurements of high-frequency turbulence parameters; - eddy covariance flux measurements of water, energy, aerosols and carbon dioxide through the canopy; - determination of biogenic and anthropogenic volatile organic compound emissions and their influence on regional atmospheric chemistry; - aerosol number and mass distributions; - chemical speciation of aerosol particles; - characterization of ice and cloud condensation nuclei; - trace gas measurements; and - model simulations using coupled chemistry and meteorology. In addition to various long-term continuous measurements, three focused measurement campaigns with state-of-the-art instrumentation have taken place since the site was established, and two of these studies are the subjects of this special issue: BEACHON-ROCS (Rocky Mountain Organic Carbon Study, 2010) and BEACHON-RoMBAS (Rocky Mountain Biogenic Aerosol Study, 2011).
This paper describes the second part of a study to document the sensitivity of the modeled regional moisture flux patterns and hydrometeorological response of the North American monsoon system (NAMS) ...to convective parameterization. Use of the convective parameterization schemes of Betts–Miller–Janjic, Kain–Fritsch, and Grell was investigated during the initial phase of the 1999 NAMS using version 3.4 of the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University–National Center for Atmospheric Research (PSU–NCAR) Mesoscale Model (MM5) running in a pseudoclimate mode. Substantial differences in both the stationary and transient components of the moisture flux fields were found between the simulations, resulting in differences in moisture convergence patterns, precipitation, and surface evapotranspiration. Basin-average calculations of hydrologic variables indicate that, in most of the basins for which calculations were made, the magnitude of the evaporation-minus-precipitation moisture source/sink differs substantially between simulations and, in some cases, even the sign of the source/sink changed. There are substantial differences in rainfall–runoff processes because the basin-average rainfall intensities, proportion of rainfall from convective origin, and the runoff coefficients differ between simulations. The results indicate that, in regions of sustained, deep convection, the selection of the subgrid convective parameterization in a high-resolution atmospheric model can potentially have a hydrometeorological impact in regional analyses, which is at least as important as the effect of land surface forcing.
The purpose of this note is to present preliminary findings from a new event-based surface rain gauge network in the region of northwest Mexico. This region is characterized as semiarid, owing the ...largest percentage of its annual rainfall to summer convective systems, which are diurnal in nature. Although the existing surface network and satellite-derived precipitation products have clarified some features of convective activity over the core region of the North American monsoon (NAM), a detailed examination of the spatial and temporal structure of such activity has been prohibited by the lack of a surface observation network with adequate temporal and spatial resolution. Specifically, the current network of sparsely spaced climate stations has inhibited a detailed diagnosis of the timing, intensity, and duration of convective rainfall in general, and of the topography–rainfall relationship in particular. In this note, a brief overview of the network and present preliminary analyses from the first monitoring season, summer 2002, is provided. It is shown that the diurnal cycle of precipitation varies with elevation in a way that is consistent with a hypothesis that convective events organize and, occasionally, propagate from high terrain onto lower-elevation plains, but more conclusive statements will require expansion of the network and increased record length. It is also emphasized from these studies that it is essential to evaluate wet-day statistics or rainfall intensities from precipitating periods in parallel, with comparable all-day statistics, when conducting hydrometeorological analyses in semiarid convective regimes where precipitation is infrequent and highly localized.
NAME 2004 Field Campaign and Modeling Strategy Higgins, Wayne; Ahijevych, Dave; Amador, Jorge ...
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,
2006, 20060101, 2006-01-00, Volume:
87, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The North American Monsoon Experiment (NAME) is an internationally coordinated process study aimed at determining the sources and limits of predictability of warm-season precipitation over North ...America. The scientific objectives of NAME are to promote a better understanding and more realistic simulation of warm-season convective processes in complex terrain, intraseasonal variability of the monsoon, and the response of the warm-season atmospheric circulation and precipitation patterns to slowly varying, potentially predictable surface boundary conditions. During the summer of 2004, the NAME community implemented an international (United States, Mexico, Central America), multiagency (NOAA, NASA, NSF, USDA) field experiment called NAME 2004. This article presents early results from the NAME 2004 campaign and describes how the NAME modeling community will leverage the NAME 2004 data to accelerate improvements in warm-season precipitation forecasts for North America.
Fluid circulation in the Earth's crust plays an essential role in surface, near surface, and deep crustal processes. Flow pathways are driven by hydraulic gradients but controlled by material ...permeability, which varies over many orders of magnitude and changes over time. Although millions of measurements of crustal properties have been made, including geophysical imaging and borehole tests, this vast amount of data and information has not been integrated into a comprehensive knowledge system. A community data infrastructure is needed to improve data access, enable large‐scale synthetic analyses, and support representations of the subsurface in Earth system models. Here, we describe the motivation, vision, challenges, and an action plan for a community‐governed, four‐dimensional data system of the Earth's crustal structure, composition, and material properties from the surface down to the brittle–ductile transition. Such a system must not only be sufficiently flexible to support inquiries in many different domains of Earth science, but it must also be focused on characterizing the physical crustal properties of permeability and porosity, which have not yet been synthesized at a large scale. The DigitalCrust is envisioned as an interactive virtual exploration laboratory where models can be calibrated with empirical data and alternative hypotheses can be tested at a range of spatial scales. It must also support a community process for compiling and harmonizing models into regional syntheses of crustal properties. Sustained peer review from multiple disciplines will allow constant refinement in the ability of the system to inform science questions and societal challenges and to function as a dynamic library of our knowledge of Earth's crust.
We describe the motivation, vision, challenges and an action plan for a community‐governed, four‐dimensional data system of the Earth's crustal structure, composition and material properties from the surface down to the brittle‐ductile transition.
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