Improved Understanding of the Link Between Catchment-Scale Vegetation Accessible Storage and Satellite-Derived Soil Water Index

The spatiotemporal dynamics of water volumes stored in the unsaturated root zone are a key control on the response of terrestrial hydrological systems. Robust, catchment-scale root-zone soil moisture estimates are thus critical for reliable predictions of river flow, groundwater recharge, or evaporation. Satellites provide estimates of near...

Climate controls how ecosystems size the root zone storage capacity at catchment scale

The root zone moisture storage capacity (SR) of terrestrial ecosystems is a buffer providing vegetation continuous access to water and a critical factor controlling land-atmospheric moisture exchange, hydrological response, and biogeochemical processes. However, it is impossible to observe directly at catchment scale. Here, using data from 300...

Inferring catchment precipitation by doing hydrology backward: A test in 24 small and mesoscale catchments in Luxembourg

The complexity of hydrological systems and the necessary simplification of models describing these systems remain major challenges in hydrological modeling. Kirchner's (2009) approach of inferring rainfall and evaporation from discharge fluctuations by “doing hydrology backward” is based on the assumption that catchment behavior can be...