Emergence of significant soil moisture depletion in the near future

Abstract

Declining soil moisture related to climate change can greatly affect social, economic, environmental, and hydrological processes, as well as extreme weather events. Hence, it is imperative to understand the timing of significant soil moisture drying under future climate change. Compared to spatial variations in soil moisture drying, however, our understanding of temporal variations remain unclear. In the present study, the timing of significant soil moisture depletion (SSD) is predicted using the soil moisture projection (0-50 cm depth) from the 30 Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project fast-track outputs under the representative concentration pathways (RCPs) 2.6 and 8.5. Under both RCP scenarios, the ensemble medians of the projections show the emergence of the timing of SSD in Western Europe, Eastern United States, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, and Southern China over 40 years (