The 20-y spatio-temporal trends of remotely sensed soil moisture and vegetation and their response to climate change over the Third Pole

Abstract

AbstractThe Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as the “Third Pole”, is a climate-sensitive and ecology-fragile region. In this study, the spatio-temporal trends of soil moisture (SM) and vegetation were analyzed using satellite-based ESA CCI SM and MODIS LAI data respectively in the growing season during the last 20 years (2000-2019) over the TP covering diverse climate zones. The climatic drivers (precipitation and air temperature) of SM and LAI variations were fully investigated by using both ERA5 reanalysis and observation-based gridded data. The results reveal the TP is generally wetting and significantly greening in the last 20 years. The SM with significant increasing trend accounts for 21.80% (fraction of grid cells) of the TP, and is about twice of the SM with significant decreasing trend (10.19%), while more than half of the TP (58.21%) exhibits significant increasing trend of LAI. Though the responses of SM and LAI to climatic factors are spatially heterogeneous, precipitation is the dominant driver of SM variation with 48.36% (ERA5) and 32.51% (observation-based) precipitation data showing the strongest significant positive partial correlation with SM. Temperature rise largely explains the vegetation greening though precipitation also plays an important role in vegetation growth in arid and semi-arid zones. The combined trend of SM and LAI indicates the TP is mainly composed of wetting and greening areas, followed by drying and greening regions. The change rate of SM is negative at low altitudes and becomes positive as altitude increases, while the LAI value and its change rate decrease as altitude increases.