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Enhanced soil moisture drying in transitional regions under a warming climate
- Analyzes global trends of soil moisture for the period 1948–2010 using the Global Land Data Assimilation System data set
- Finds soil moisture was dominated by negative trends, with pronounced drying over East Asia and the Sahel
- Reveals—using spatial analysis according to climatic region—that the most obvious drying occurred over transitional regions between dry and wet climates
- Finds the noticeable drying first took place in the humid transitional regions and extended to the dry transitional regions, beginning in the 1980s
- Finds the variability of soil moisture was notably related to the changes in precipitation and temperature, but with different roles
- Finds that for the global average, precipitation had a dominant effect on the variability of soil moisture at interannual to decadal time scales, but temperature was the main cause of the long-term trend of soil moisture on the whole
- Results indicate the enhanced soil drying in the transitional regions was primarily caused by global warming, which is illustrated by regression analysis and the land surface model
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