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Urgent need to improve modelled sensitivity of evaporation to vegetation change

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Earth system model projections of vegetation–climate feedback frequently depend on inaccurate values of evaporation sensitivity to vegetation changes, potentially resulting in misleading conclusions. A promising avenue involves improving the transpiration partitioning parameterizations and incorporating groundwater connections to refine the modelled sensitivity.

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Fig. 1: Disparities in climate responses to idealized deforestation within the deforest-glob experiment of LUMIP.
Fig. 2: Schematic diagram highlighting problems in transpiration partitioning in Earth system models.

Data availability

The CMIP6 model outputs are available from the CMIP6 archive (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/). The GLEAM data is available at https://www.gleam.eu/.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42371026 and 42071022) and by the start-up fund provided by the Southern University of Science and Technology (29/Y01296602, 29/Y01296122 and 29/Y01296222).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Dashan Wang & Zhenzhong Zeng

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  1. Dashan Wang
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  2. Zhenzhong Zeng
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Correspondence to Zhenzhong Zeng.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Water thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Wang, D., Zeng, Z. Urgent need to improve modelled sensitivity of evaporation to vegetation change. Nat Water 2, 211–214 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00203-y

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