Preface – special issue on “coupled atmosphere‐hydrological processes: Novel system developments and cross‐compartment evaluations”

Abstract

Water and energy fluxes between the land surface and the atmospheric boundary layer entail complex interactions (Betts et al., 1996;Fisher & Koven, 2020). Comprehensive process-based modelling of all major intertwined fluxes, related non-linear feedbacks and scale-dependent properties is a cutting-edge approach to advance the understanding of the interaction of water with both the atmospheric and the land surface system, which requires compartment-crossing strategies. The need for dynamically coupling different model compartments was foreseen already decades ago and grew parallel with increasing technological opportunities, like high-performance computing advances, development of efficient couplers and the availability of comprehensive earth observation datasets. Eagleson (1986) already claimed that the solution to multiple hydrological problems at the local scale requires "global scale dynamic modelling of the coupled ocean-atmosphere-land surface".Twenty years later, Beven (2007) suggested that dynamic "coupling between atmospheric forcing, catchment response, river runoff and coastal interaction with tidally dominated sea levels" can be crucial for flood protection. Such increasing awareness led hydrologists to overcome previous disciplinary boundaries and decisively become intimate with atmospheric sciences.Today, coupled atmosphere-hydrological models address the challenge by describing the water-and energy cycle from groundwater across the land surface to the top of the atmosphere. The new | Soil moistureprecipitation feedbackThe special Issue presents three articles addressing the issue of soil moistureprecipitation feedback at the catchment scale and one at