Hydrology and Earth System Sciences www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net 1027-5606 1607-7938 14 3 2010 10.5194/hess-14-505-2010 http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/14/505/2010/ http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/14/505/2010/hess-14-505-2010.html http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/14/505/2010/hess-14-505-2010.pdf 505 520 2010-03-15 Contribution of soil moisture feedback to hydroclimatic variability N. Y. Krakauer nkrakauer@ccny.cuny.edu B. I. Cook M. J. Puma Department of Civil Engineering, The City College of New York, New York, USA NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, USA While a variety of model experiments and analyses of observations have explored the impact of soil moisture variation on climate, it is not yet clear how large or detectable soil moisture feedback is across spatial and temporal scales. Here, we study the impact of dynamic versus climatological soil moisture in the GISS GCM ModelE (with prescribed sea-surface temperatures) on the variance and on the spatial and temporal correlation scale of hydrologically relevant climate variables (evaporation, precipitation, temperature, cloud cover) over the land surface. We also confirm that synoptic variations in soil moisture have a substantial impact on the mean climate state, because of the nonlinearity of the dependence of evapotranspiration on soil moisture.<br> <br> We find that including dynamic soil moisture increases the interannual variability of seasonal (summer and fall) and annual temperature, precipitation, and cloudiness. Dynamic soil moisture tends to decrease the correlation length scale of seasonal (warm-season) to annual land temperature fluctuations and increase that of precipitation. 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