Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 115, Issue 16, Pages 4093-4098Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1720712115
Keywords
water cycle; vegetation physiology; climate change; land-atmosphere coupling; hydrology
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Funding
- NASA Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction program
- Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Contribution [8199]
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Predicting how increasing atmospheric CO2 will affect the hydrologic cycle is of utmost importance for a range of applications ranging from ecological services to human life and activities. A typical perspective is that hydrologic change is driven by precipitation and radiation changes due to climate change, and that the land surface will adjust. Using Earth system models with decoupled surface (vegetation physiology) and atmospheric (radiative) CO2 responses, we here show that the CO2 physiological response has a dominant role in evapotranspiration and evaporative fraction changes and has a major effect on long-term runoff compared with radiative or precipitation changes due to increased atmospheric CO2. This major effect is true for most hydrological stress variables over the largest fraction of the globe, except for soil moisture, which exhibits a more nonlinear response. This highlights the key role of vegetation in controlling future terrestrial hydrologic response and emphasizes that the carbon and water cycles are intimately coupled over land.
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