No abstract

The advection‐aridity approach to estimate actual evaporation from natural land surfaces is one of the better known implementations of Bouchet's complementary principle. Detailed measurements at 2, 12, and 32 m above the ground surface during the growing seasons of 2004–2007 allowed validation of a generalized nonlinear form of this approach above the highly variable terrain in Changwu County in the southern Loess Plateau of the Yellow River basin in China. The obtained values of the parameters were found to lie well within the ranges to be expected on physical grounds or from previous measurements by different experimental means; calibration on the basis of any one year of data allowed predictions within roughly 5% on average. Relative to the corresponding observed turbulent vapor fluxes, the evaporation rates calculated with measurements at the highest level of 32 m displayed the least scatter but only slightly less than those calculated with measurements at the lower level of 12 m; however, those based on measurements at the lowest level of 2 m displayed considerably more scatter than those derived at the two higher levels. This is consistent with the existence of a blending height at higher elevations above the ground, where the effects of surface variability tend to fade away.

Climatic suitability and spatial distribution for summer maize cultivation in China at 1.5 and 2.0 °C global warming Science Bulletin 64, 690 (2019); Increasing impacts from extreme precipitation on population over China with global warming Science Bulletin 65, 243 (2020); Changes in precipitation and extreme precipitation in a warming environment in China

Understanding the sensitivity of ecosystem production and respiration to climate change is critical for predicting terrestrial carbon dynamics. Here we show that the primary control on the inter-annual variability of net ecosystem carbon exchange switches from production to respiration at a precipitation threshold between 750 and 950 mm yr−1 in the contiguous United States. This precipitation threshold is evident across multiple datasets and scales of observation indicating that it is a robust result and provides a new scaling relationship between climate and carbon dynamics. However, this empirical precipitation threshold is not captured by dynamic global vegetation models, which tend to overestimate the sensitivity of production and underestimate the sensitivity of respiration to water availability in more mesic regions. Our results suggest that the short-term carbon balance of ecosystems may be more sensitive to respiration losses than previously thought and that model simulations may underestimate the positive carbon–climate feedbacks associated with respiration.