Earth Observation

Background Seasonal water deficits, caused by the imbalance of water from the land surface through evapotranspiration and runoff and the gain through precipitation, are an important driver of agricultural productivity and forest growth.

Background Droughts have major impacts on fluxes between land and the atmosphere, agricultural production, and the carbon cycle. Future projections of drought magnitude and frequencies are surprisingly divergent and interpretations of trends from Earth System Model outputs have drawn conflicting pictures of drought impact trends in a heating climate.

Supervision: Dr. Koen Hufkens and Prof. Benjamin Stocker We call on students to determine the importance of topographic and soil factors on natural vegetative landscape components (forest cover fraction, vegetation height, woody fraction).