Improved understanding of soil moisture variability dynamics

Different trends of soil moisture variability with mean moisture content have been reported from field observations. Here we explain these trends for three different data sets by showing how vegetation, soil and topography controls interact to either create or destroy spatial variance. Improved understanding of these processes is needed for the transformation of point-scale measurements and parameterizations to scales required for climate studies, operational weather forecasting, and large scale hydrological modeling.

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