Energy and Water Cycle over the Land Surface in the Tibetan Plateau

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To understand and model the seasonal and interannual variability of the Asian summer monsoon, it is important to address the hydrological processes, especially the origin and circulation of water vapor at large scale, the precipitation fields, and the land surface hydrological processes in the Tibetan Plateau.Due to the non-linear relationship between evaporation and soil moisture, calculated evaporation by using spatially averaged soil moisture is smaller than actual one under dry condition and larger under wet condition. The effects of the wide range of the soil moisture distributuion due to the presence of detention in the Tibetan Plateau is expressed by a linear function of the standard deviation of soil moisture(Hirose et al., 2000). This result suggests a method for scaling up heterogeneous land surface processes.Because of the relatively few ground observation stations over the Tibetan Plateau, efficient monitoring and continuity in space-time sampling over the complete plateau are only possible by satellite remote sensing. In turn, the field observations and process studies help serve as sources of ground-truth information for satellite-based retrieval algorithms. To meet the objectives of the process and modeling studies reported above, GAME-Tibet focused on the development and validation of satellite algorithms for precipitation, radiation budget, surface fluxes, soil moisture and snow.