Journal article
Long-term trends in evapotranspiration and runoff over the drainage basins of the Gulf of Mexico during 1901-2008
M Liu, H Tian, Q Yang, J Yang, X Song, SE Lohrenz, WJ Cai
Water Resources Research | AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION | Published : 2013
DOI: 10.1002/wrcr.20180
Abstract
The Gulf of Mexico (GOM) is facing large pressures from environmental changes since the beginning of the last century. However, the magnitude and long-term trend of total water discharge to the GOM and the underlying processes are not well understood. In this study, the dynamic land ecosystem model (DLEM) has been improved and applied to investigate spatial and temporal variations of evapotranspiration (ET) and runoff (R) over drainage basins of the GOM during 1901-2008. Modeled ET and discharge were evaluated against upscaled data sets and gauge observations. Simulated results demonstrated a significant decrease in ET at a rate of 15 mm yr-1 century-1 and an insignificant trend in runoff/pr..
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Awarded by NASA Interdisciplinary Science Program
Funding Acknowledgements
This study has been supported by NASA Interdisciplinary Science Program (NNX10AU06G), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) NICCR Program, and Auburn University Water Resources Center Integrated Watershed Project. We would like to thank Chaoqun Lu, Wei Ren, Chi Zhang, and Bo Tao for their help in collecting the data and calibrating the model. We thank Adam and Hamlet for their valuable discussion related to this paper, and Greg Gould and Julian Reyes for helping us edit the text. Thanks also go to Martin Jung (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry) for providing the MTE data and Aiguo Dai for providing the reconstructed historical river discharge data. Eddy-flux tower sites are part of the AmeriFlux network, and we gratefully acknowledge the efforts of researchers at these sites. Sites are funded through grants from the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) unless otherwise noted. The flux level 4 data being used in this study were downloaded from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) (ftp://cdiac.ornl.gov/pub/ameriflux/data/Level4/AllSites/).