HR: 08:15h
AN: H31M-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Simulated Soil Moisture Climatology in North America: Does the Water Table Matter?
AU: * Miguez-Macho, G
EM: gonzalo@fmares.usc.es
AF: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Facultade de Fisicas, Campus Sur, Santiago de Comp., 15782, Spain
AU: Li, H
EM: haibinli@princeton.edu
AF: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, E-208 E-Quad, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
AU: Fan, Y
EM: yingfan@rci.rutgers.edu
AF: Department of Geological Sciences, Rutgers University, Wright Labs, 610 Taylor Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8066, United States
AB: We demonstrate the link between two terrestrial water reservoirs: the root-zone soil moisture and the groundwater. Since soil moisture strongly influences land-atmosphere fluxes, its link to the groundwater may affect the spatial-temporal variability of these fluxes. Here we simulate the climatologic water table depth at 30 arc-second resolution as constrained by US Geological Survey site observations. Then we use this water table climatology as the lower boundary for the soil, and VIC (Variable Infiltration Capacity) simulated landsurface flux climatology as the upper boundary, to calculate the soil moisture climatology (SMC) at 14 depths (down to 4 m). Comparisons with VIC, NARR (North America Regional Reanalysis) and observations suggest that, first, SMC is wetter than VIC, despite identical landsurface flux; second, while climate is the dominant signature in NARR and VIC, the water table manifest itself in SMC, with wet soil over shallow water table; third, while soils in VIC and NARR get drier with depth, soils in SMC get wetter in regions of shallow water table; and lastly, SMC has the highest root-zone (top-2 m) total soil water storage. These differences may have implications to climate modeling.
DE: 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions (1218, 1843, 3322)
DE: 1655 Water cycles (1836)
DE: 1807 Climate impacts
DE: 1833 Hydroclimatology
DE: 1866 Soil moisture
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting