Traditionally, hydrologists have always considered precipitation and temperature as input to their models and evaporation as a loss. However, more than half of the evaporation globally comes back as precipitation on land. Greenhouse gasses and land-use changes alter, not only, the local water cycle, but through atmospheric water and energy feedbacks also effect the water cycle in remote locations.
This session aims to:
i) show applied studies using fundamental characteristics of the atmospheric branch of the hydrologic cycle on different scales. These fundamentals include, but are not limited to, atmospheric circulation, humidity, residence times, recycling ratios, sources and sinks of atmospheric moisture, energy balance and climatic extremes.
ii) investigate the remote and local atmospheric feedbacks from human interventions such as greenhouse gasses, irrigation, deforestation, and reservoirs on the water cycle, precipitation and climate, based on observations and coupled modelling approaches.
iii) evaluate different sources of data for atmospheric hydrology and implications for inter-comparison and meta-analysis. For example, observations networks, isotopic studies, conceptual models, back-trajectories, reanalysis and fully coupled earth system model simulations.
iv) explore the implications of atmospheric feedbacks on the hydrologic cycle for land and water management. Can we favorably alter atmospheric hydrology and precipitation by means of ground based interventions of changing land cover, and thus changing evaporation, albedo and surface roughness?
This session is a companion session to AS4.3 “The atmospheric water cycle: processes, dynamics and characteristics”