Seasonal analysis of surface soil moisture dry-downs in a land-atmosphere hotspot as seen by LSM and satellite products

SALVIA, M.; POLCHER J; A. SÖRENSSON; KARSZENBAUM, H.; R. RUSCICA,; PILES M

Valencia

Simposio; International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS18; 2018

AbstractThe soil dryingprocess is a challenging framework to assess climatic, hydrologic andecosystem processes. This work develops a seasonal analysis oftemporal e-folding decay (tao) of surface soil moisture dry-downsusing ORCHIDEE land surface model and SMOS observations over SouthEastern South America(SESA). Results show that the soil drying process depends on bothlocation and season, and that the modeled drying velocity is fasterthan the observed one, even when modeled data is sampled at the samefrequency as the observations. Differences between observed andmodeled data have been found both in the analysis of the regionaloverall tao and in the spatial patterns of tao estimates. A seasonaltimescale analysis is presented here for further insight of soilmoisture dry-downs, allowing to reconcile differences betweenobservations and models.p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120%; }