The Budyko and complementary relationships in the large-scale coupled land-atmosphere system
Abstract
The Budyko and complementary relationships reflect emergent behaviors in the hydrologic cycle. Although these relationships appear to hold across a wide range of climate and ecosystem conditions, they remain largely unexplained. Here we use an idealized prototype of large-scale land-atmosphere coupling developed in prior work to derive (at an implicitly large and climatic scales) expressions analogous to the Budyko and complementary relationships. In contrast to many prior analytic approaches, the approach here considers convection and precipitation implicitly as part of the solution rather than as an external forcing. The analytic solutions permit diagnosis of the sensitivity of the Budyko and complementary relationships to various atmospheric and land surface processes. In particular, we use these relationships to investigate how anthropogenic influences, including large-scale irrigation and global warming, may be expected to impact the hydrologic cycle. Moreover, using simplified ecohydrological modeling, we show how vegetation adaptation further constrains the stability of the Budyko curve. Vegetation effectively acts as a seasonal low-pass filter, producing in-phase energy (radiation) and water (precipitation) availability that in turn maximize carbon gain.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFM.H11A1151L
- Keywords:
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- 1833 HYDROLOGY Hydroclimatology;
- 1854 HYDROLOGY Precipitation;
- 1818 HYDROLOGY Evapotranspiration;
- 1836 HYDROLOGY Hydrological cycles and budgets