Space-time self-organization of mesoscale rainfall and soil moisture

✍ Scribed by Paolo D'Odorico; Ignacio Rodrı́guez-Iturbe

• Book ID: 104326985
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 273 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0309-1708
• DOI: 10.1016/s0309-1708(99)00030-5

✦ Synopsis

The eects of mesoscale circulations induced by soil moisture heterogeneities are studied to assess the impact that the coupling of the land surface and the planetary boundary layer has on the rainfall and soil moisture dynamics at dierent scales. Our goal is to single out the most important physical mechanisms which aect the behaviour of the land-atmosphere system at the mesoscale leading to a dynamical evolution which shows the same features at dierent scales both in space and time. In particular we aim to understand if any hypothesis of self-organization in the system can ®nd its rationale in the mesoscale soil-atmosphere coupling. The main mechanisms of interaction have been simulated through a cellular automata model which incorporates in a soil water balance both the local and the large scale phenomena. Fractal features are shown to emerge in the simulated hydrological ®elds as an eect of the land-atmosphere coupling and this suggests the possible occurrence of self-organization. Some comparisons with real data tend to support such a hypothesis.