Water resources availability severely constrains the social and economic developments of nations, increased research on the terrestrial water cycle is essential for identifying the problems caused by water resource deficiences (e.g. shortage, surplus, poor quality) and in making informed decisions. However, much is still unknown about the role of the land surface hydrological process in the terrestrial water cycle, in particular the feedbacks of the land surface hydrological processes on climate at different spatial and temporal scales. This session will focus on the role of land surface hydrological processes in land atmosphere interactions and will attempt to explore the potential on how to address land surface hydrological processes from field experiments, remote sensing and land surface processes numerical modeling.

The following three themes are of particular interests to this session: 1) Recent land surface hydrological process field experiments and preliminary results; (2) Assessment of land surface hydrological processes from ground measurements, remote sensing and numerical modeling, especially on algorithm development and validation, and applications of remote sensing data in land surface hydrological process numerical modeling; (3) the response of the key variables of land surface hydrological processes to the local and global climate change. The emphasis of the contributions should be on new measurement techniques, new or new use of data sets and new ideas of attacking problems in spatial and temporal scales. New results and activities in the framework of international programmes such as e.g. GEWEX, GEO and GMES initiatives are of particular interest to this session.