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Director: Prof. Piermaria Corona
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News from DISAFRI

New insights into the global water cycle

A new international study reveals the global water vapor flux from land is weakening or even halting over the last decade. This finding is reported by a team of international  scientists in this week’s issue of Nature.
An international cooperative study based on a network of ecosystem observations (FLUXNET), satellite remote sensing and model simulation has quantified the global water flux from the land ecosystems to the atmosphere (land evapotranspiration) over the past 27 years (1982-2008). The study found the long-term trend of increasing evapotranspiration from the 1980s to the 1990s to be weakening or even halting in the last decade, contrary to expectations of increasing water transport from land to the atmosphere with warming. A large part of this weakening signal is coming from the Southern Hemisphere, where land evapotranspiration has declined over large parts of the region in the last ten years. Satellite measurements of soil moisture showed that the reason for this decline in the evapotranspiration trend is a decreasing soil moisture, essentially drying of the soil.

Citation:

Jung, M., M. Reichstein, P. Ciais, S.I. Seneviratne, J. Sheffield, M.L. Goulden, G. Bonan, A. Cescatti, J. Chen, R. de Jeu, A.J. Dolman, W. Eugster, D. Gerten, D. Gianelle, N. Gobron, J. Heinke, J. Kimball, B.E. Law, L. Montagnani, Q. Mu, B. Mueller, K. Oleson, D. Papale, A.D. Richardson, O. Roupsard, S.W. Running, E. Tomelleri, N. Viovy, U. Weber, C. Williams, E. Wood, S. Zaehle, K. Zhang. 2010. A recent decline in the global land evapotranspiration trend due to limited moisture supply. Nature doixxxx. In press (Embargoed lifts August xx, 2010 at 1300 Eastern Time).
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