Soil moisture–atmosphere coupling strength over central Europe in the recent warming climate

Schwitalla, Thomas; Jach, Lisa; Wulfmeyer, Volker; Warrach-Sagi, Kirsten

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-25-1405-2025

Articles | Volume 25, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-25-1405-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Past and future European atmospheric extreme events under...

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-25-1405-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 25, issue 4

Research article

|

14 Apr 2025

Research article |

| 14 Apr 2025

Soil moisture–atmosphere coupling strength over central Europe in the recent warming climate

Thomas Schwitalla, Lisa Jach, Volker Wulfmeyer, and Kirsten Warrach-Sagi

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-25-1405-2025-supplement

Data sets

ERA5 hourly data on single levels from 1940 to present H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47

An Ensemble Version of the E-OBS Temperature and Precipitation Data Sets (https://surfobs.climate.copernicus.eu/dataaccess/access_eobs.php#datafiles) R. C. Cornes et al. https://doi.org/10.1029/2017JD028200

Model code and software

Terrestrial coupling indices A. B. Tawfik https://github.com/abtawfik/coupling-metrics/tree/master/terrestrial_coupling_index

NCAR Command Language (NCL) D. Brown et al. https://doi.org/10.5065/D6WD3XH5

Download

Article (16736 KB)
Full-text XML

Short summary

During recent decades, Europe has experienced increasing periods of severe drought and heatwave. To provide an overview of how land-surface conditions shape land–atmosphere (LA) coupling, the interannual LA coupling strength variability for the summer seasons of 1991–2022 is investigated by means of ERA5 data. The results clearly reflect ongoing climate change by a shift in the coupling relationships towards reinforced heating and drying by the land surface.