Abstract
Soil moisture influences and is influenced by water, climate, and ecosystem conditions, affecting associated ecosystem services in the landscape. This paper couples snow storage-melting dynamics with an analytical modeling approach to screening basin-scale, long-term soil moisture variability and change in a changing climate. This coupling enables assessment of both spatial differences and temporal changes across a wide range of hydro-climatic conditions. Model application is exemplified for two major Swedish hydrological basins, Norrström and Piteälven. These are located along a steep temperature gradient and have experienced different hydro-climatic changes over the time period of study, 1950–2009. Spatially, average intra-annual variability of soil moisture differs considerably between the basins due to their temperature-related differences in snow dynamics. With regard to temporal change, the long-term average state and intra-annual variability of soil moisture have not changed much, while inter-annual variability has changed considerably in response to hydro-climatic changes experienced so far in each basin.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 6-16 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Ambio |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue number | Suppl. 1 |
| Early online date | 9 Jan 2015 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2015 |
Keywords
- soil moisture
- groundwater
- snow dynamics
- climate change
- landscape scale
- hydrological basin
Access to Document
- Screening variability and change of soil moisture under wideranging climate conditions: Snow dynamics effects
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