The Soil Moisture of China in a High Resolution Climate-Vegetation Model

The spatial distribution of soil moisture, especially the temporal variation at seasonal and interannual scales, is difficult for many land surface models (LSMs) to capture partly due to the deficiencies of the LSMs and the highly spatial variability of soil moisture, which makes it problematic to simulate the moisture for climate studies. However the soil moisture plays an important role in influencing the energy and hydrological cycles between the land and air, so it should be considered in land surface models. In this paper, a soil moisture simulation in China with a T213 resolution (about 0.5625°× 0.5625°) is compared to the observational data, and its relationship to precipitation is explored. The soil moisture distribution agrees roughly with the observations, and the soil moisture pattern reflects the variation and intensity of the precipitation. In particular, for the 1998 summer catastrophic floods along the Yangtze River, the soil moisture remains high in this region from July to August and represents the flood well. The seasonal cycle of soil moisture is roughly consistent with the observed data, which is a good calibration forthe ground simulation capacity of the Atmosphere-Vegetation Interaction Model (AVIM) with respect to this tough problem for land surface models.