Groundwater in Africa supports livelihoods and poverty alleviation 1,2 , maintains vital ecosystems, and strongly influences terrestrial water and energy budgets 3. However, hydrologic processes governing groundwater recharge sustaining this resource, and their sensitivity to climatic variability, are poorly constrained 4,5. Here we show, through analysis of multi-decadal groundwater hydrographs across sub-Saharan Africa, how aridity controls the predominant recharge processes whereas local hydrogeology influences the type and sensitivity of precipitation-recharge relationships. Some humid locations show approximately linear precipitation-recharge relationships with small rainfall intensity exceedance thresholds governing recharge; others show surprisingly small variation in recharge across a wide range of annual precipitation. As aridity increases, precipitation thresholds governing initiation of recharge increase, recharge becomes more episodic, and focussed recharge via losses from ephemeral overland flows becomes increasingly dominant. Extreme annual recharge is commonly associated with intense rainfall and flooding events, themselves often driven by largescale climate controls. Intense precipitation, even during lower precipitation years, produces substantial recharge in some dry subtropical locations, challenging the 'high certainty' consensus that drying climatic trends will decrease water resources in such regions 4. The likely resilience of groundwater in many areas revealed by improved understanding of precipitation-recharge

Seasonal water storage fluctuations are critical for evaluating water scarcity linked to climate forcing and human intervention. Here we compare seasonal changes in land total water storage anomalies using seven global hydrologic and land surface models (WGHM, PCR‐GLOBWB, and five GLDAS models) to GRACE satellite data in 183 river basins globally. This work builds on previous analysis that focused on total water storage anomaly trends. Results show that most models underestimate seasonal water storage amplitudes in tropical and (semi)arid basins and land surface models generally overestimate amplitudes in northern basins. Some models (CLM‐5.0 and PCR‐GLOBWB) agree better with GRACE than others. Causes of model‐GRACE discrepancies are attributed to missing storage compartments (e.g., surface water and/or groundwater) and underestimation of modeled storage capacities in tropical basins and to variations in modeled fluxes in northern basins. This study underscores the importance of considering water storage, in addition to water fluxes, to improve global models.

From the 1980s, Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) shows a decreasing trend over north and northwest India, and there was a significant observed reduction in July over central and south India in 1982–2003. The key drivers of the changed ISMR, however, remain unclear. It was hypothesized that the large-scale irrigation development that started in the 1950s has resulted in land surface cooling, which slowed large-scale atmospheric circulation, exerting significant influences on ISMR. To test this hypothesis, a fully coupled model, the CESM v1.0.3, was used with a global irrigation dataset. In this study, spatially varying irrigation-induced feedback mechanisms are investigated in detail at different stages of the monsoon. Results show that soil moisture and evapotranspiration increase significantly over India throughout the summertime because of the irrigation. However, 2-m air temperature shows a significant reduction only in a limited region because the temperature change is influenced simultaneously by surface incoming shortwave radiation and evaporative cooling resulting from the irrigation, especially over the heavily irrigated region. Irrigation also induces a 925-hPa northeasterly wind from 30°N toward the equator. This is opposite to the prevailing direction of the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) wind that brings moist air to India. The modeled rainfall in the irrigated case significantly decreases up to 1.5 mm day−1 over central and north India from July to September. This paper reveals that the irrigation can contribute to both increasing and decreasing the surface temperature via multiple feedback mechanisms. The net effect is to weaken the ISM with the high spatial and temporal heterogeneity.

125°S-60°S) are significantly impacted by the WT, showing a decrease in air temperature (−0.5 K over mid-latitudes and −1 K over tropics) and an increase in precipitation. The latter can be explained by more vigorous updrafts due to an increased meridional temperature gradient between the equator and higher latitudes, which transports more water vapour upward, causing a positive precipitation change in the ascending branch. Over the West African Monsoon and Australian Monsoon regions, the precipitation changes in both intensity (increases) and location (poleward). The more intense convection and the change of the large-scale dynamics are responsible for this change. Transition zones, such as the Mediterranean area and central North America, are also impacted, with strengthened convection resulting from increased ET.

Recent evidence has shown that relations between soil moisture and precipitation at spatial and temporal aspect are contrary to each other: afternoon precipitation tends to occur at times in which conditions are overall wet and heterogeneous in the morning, but preferentially over those patches that are relatively drier than the surroundings. This study expands the notion of soil moisture‐precipitation spatial coupling by analyzing the preferred precipitation location over a range of different soil moisture patterns. Using global observations of precipitation and observationally constrained evaporative stress estimates, we confirm that relatively drier patches have more chances of receiving rain, but the preference is weakened under wetter soil conditions. During extremely wet times, wet patches have more chances of receiving rain. Moreover, the preference of precipitation to occur on drier soils is stronger when soil moisture conditions are heterogeneous. Such results indicate that the positive feedback mechanism becomes more positive as soil wetness increases and the negative feedback mechanism becomes more negative as soils become drier and more heterogeneous. The strength of these two feedback mechanisms jointly affects preferential precipitation location. Counterintuitively, analysis from 1 day after‐event soil moisture pattern shows that negative soil moisture‐precipitation coupling may in turn further heterogenize soil moisture patterns, because dry patch gets extremely wet with no or less rain in surrounding. Although results here do not necessarily imply a causal relationship, this work contributes to enhancing our understanding of soil moisture‐precipitation spatial coupling and exposes the complex nuances of these land‐atmosphere interactions.