Impact of soil moisture on the variability in present and future climate

In a changing climate there is an increasing chance of weather extremes such as heatwaves, droughts, and floods. In many regions, including large parts of Europe, the coupling between the atmosphere and the land surface acts to amplify these extremes. This coupling mainly takes place through soil moisture and its effect on evapotranspiration. However current land surface models strongly disagree on the strength of this effect, potentially leading to incorrect simulations of climate variability. More research is needed to understand the strength of this effect and to assess its impact on climate simulations. We will investigate this using a combination of observations, simulations with simplified land surface models, and state-of-the-art regional climate modelling.