Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

The Earth's water cycle is changing, with consequential impacts evident across spatial scales. On continental scales, atmospheric moisture transport from oceans to land is increasing as the world warms. On local and regional scales, changes in land use, vegetation, and soil moisture alter surface fluxes of heat and moisture, which in turn impact boundary layer dynamics, temperature, humidity, and convection. In this talk, I will present examples of these multi-scale changes and introduce two tools to examine how terrestrial hydroclimatic changes are shaped by behavioral regimes defined by the nonlinear relationship between soil moisture (SM) and evapotranspiration (ET).

The Soil Moisture-Aridity Index phase space provides a framework for understanding regional vulnerabilities to heatwaves and droughts, while the Segmented SM-ET analysis method is a novel application of a frequency-intensity decomposition to attribute changes in ET to either changes in daily SM availability or other factors. Ultimately, disentangling the roles of water and energy availability, soil physics, and vegetation dynamics is central to improving understanding, predictions, and projections of terrestrial hydroclimate, both in the mean and the extremes.