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This paper presents results of 1 year (from March 25, 2003 to March 24, 2004 of continuous measurements of net ecosystem CO 2 exchange (NEE) above a steppe in Mongolia using the eddy covariance technique. The steppe, typical of central Mongolia, is dominated by C 3 plants adapted to the continental climate. The following two questions are addressed: (1) how do NEE and its components: gross ecosystem production (GEP) and total ecosystem respiration (R eco ) vary seasonally? (2) how do NEE, GEP, and R eco respond to biotic and abiotic factors? The hourly minimal NEE and the hourly maximal R eco were À3.6 and 1.2 lmol m À2 s À1 , respectively (negative values denoting net carbon uptake by the canopy from the atmosphere). Peak daily sums of NEE, GEP, and R eco were À2.3, 3.5, and 1.5 g C m À2 day À1 , respectively. The annual sums of GEP, R eco , and NEE were 179, 138, and À41 g C m À2 , respectively. The carbon removal by sheep was estimated to range between 10 and 82 g C m À2 yr À1 using four different approaches. Including these estimates in the overall carbon budget yielded net ecosystem productivity of À23 to 1 20 g C m À2 yr À1 . Thus, within the remaining experimental uncertainty the carbon budget at this steppe site can be considered to be balanced. For the growing period (from April 23 to October 21, 2003), 26% and 53% of the variation in daily NEE and GEP, respectively, could be explained by the changes in leaf area index. Seasonality of GEP, R eco , and NEE was closely associated with precipitation, especially in the peak growing season when GEP and R eco were largest. Water stress was observed in late July to early August, which switched the steppe from a carbon sink to a carbon source. For the entire growing period, the light response curves of daytime NEE showed a rather low apparent quantum yield (a 5À0.0047 lmol CO 2 lmol À1 photons of photosynthetically active radiation). However, the a values varied with air temperature (T a ), vapor pressure deficit, and soil water content.

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Global-scale surface soil moisture products are currently available from multiple remote sensing platforms. Footprint-scale assessments of these products are generally restricted to limited number of densely-instrumented validation sites. However, by taking active and passive soil moisture products together with a third independent soil moisture estimates via land surface modeling, triple collocation (TC) can be applied to estimate the correlation metric of satellite soil moisture products (versus an unknown ground truth) over a quasi-global domain. Here, an assessment of Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) surface soil moisture retrievals via TC is presented. Considering the potential violation of TC error assumptions, the impact of active-passive and satellite-model error cross correlations on the TC-derived inter-comparison results is examined at in situ sites using quadruple collocation analysis. In addition, confidence intervals for the TC-estimated correlation metric are constructed from moving-block bootstrap sampling designed to preserve the temporal persistence of the original (unevenly-sampled) soil moisture time-series. This study is the first to apply TC to obtain a robust global-scale cross-assessment of SMAP, SMOS and ASCAT soil moisture retrieval accuracy in terms of anomaly temporal correlation. Our results confirm the overall advantage of SMAP (with a global average anomaly correlation of 0.76) over SMOS (0.66) and ASCAT (0.63) that has been established in several recent regional, ground-based studies. SMAP is also the best-performing product over the majority of applicable land pixels (52%), although SMOS and ASCAT each shows advantage in distinct geographic regions.

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[1] Land-atmosphere interactions on the Tibetan Plateau are important because of their influence on energy and water cycles on both regional and global scales. Flux variance and eddy covariance methods were used to measure turbulent fluxes of heat, water vapor, and momentum over a Tibetan shortgrass prairie during the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Asian Monsoon Experiment (GAME) in 1998. Under unstable conditions during the monsoon period (July-September), the observed standard deviations of temperature and specific humidity (normalized by appropriate scaling parameters) followed the Monin-Obukhov theory. The similarity constants for heat C T and water vapor C q in their dimensionless functions of stability under a free convection limit were both 1.1, unlike the differences (i.e., C T C q ) reported in other studies. While the transfer efficiency of heat and water vapor exchange generally agreed with the prediction from the Monin-Obukhov theory, momentum exchange was less efficient than predicted. In comparison with the eddy covariance data, the flux variance method (with C T = C q = 1.1) underestimated both heat and water vapor fluxes by <5%. When the eddy covariance data were absent, the flux variance method was used for gap filling the seasonal flux database. To estimate latent heat flux during the premonsoon period in June, C T /C q was approximated as r Tq (where r Tq is a correlation coefficient for the fluctuations of temperature and water vapor) because of the sensitivity of C q to changes in soil moisture conditions. The dramatic changes in the Bowen ratio from 9.0 to 0.4 indicate the shift of energy sources for atmospheric heating over the plateau, which, in turn, resulted in the shift of turbulent exchange mechanisms for heat and water vapor.