Open AccessModeled and observed soil moisture variability over a region of Argentina
Author(s) -
Ferreira Lorena,
Salgado Héctor,
Saulo Celeste,
Collini Estela
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
atmospheric science letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.951
H-Index - 45
ISSN - 1530-261X
DOI - 10.1002/asl.342
Subject(s) - forcing (mathematics) , environmental science , water content , climatology , moisture , atmospheric sciences , meteorology , geography , geology , geotechnical engineering
The aim of this study is to document how soil moisture variability is represented by global analyses and regional atmospheric models compared with a unique dataset of sparse measurements over an agricultural productive area of Argentina. Results show that normalized simulated soil moisture values and their temporal variability are largely different from the observations. However, there is a strong agreement among values derived using the same land surface model, suggesting a strong influence of the forcing fields used by the different analyses/simulations. This work also discusses possible sources of model limitations for representing soil moisture variability over the region. Copyright © 2011 Royal Meteorological Society