And we mean that literally. Most models fail to properly account for moisture in the top portions of the soil. Rutgers University Professor Alan Robock and a slew of international colleagues are in the process of assembling a global data set of soil moisture measurements. Their recent report of these trends in the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society is yet another harbinger of the greener era to come. The trend in summer soil moisture for stations or regions with the longest records.
All trends show moisture increases or no change.
Those of you who have been following the global warming issue will hardly be surprised that many GCMs predict that summertime drying will accompany CO 2 increases. Probably because most of the warming has been at night, leaving daytime evaporation mostly unaffected. And increasing precipitation, which may or may not be linked to higher temperatures, is nothing but good news for plants thriving in the robust enhanced-CO 2 environment. Robock and colleagues also compared summer soil moisture trends as predicted by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory's GCM over the region of interest. Robock, A. et al., 2000.