Upwind terrestrial influences on soil moisture variability across South America
Feini Huang, Shijie Jiang, Wei Shangguan, Gustau Camps-Valls, Alexander Winkler, Wantong Li, Gregory Duveiller, Christian Reimers, Wenli Zhao, Markus Reichstein, Yongjiu Dai · 2026
Read Upwind terrestrial influences on soil moisture variability across South America by Feini Huang, Shijie Jiang, Wei Shangguan, Gustau Camps-Valls, Alexander Winkler, Wantong Li, Gregory Duveiller, Christian Reimers, Wenli Zhao, Markus Reichstein, Yongjiu Dai (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13400732.txt.
Description
Feini Huang and a large team quantify, in 2026, how vegetation upwind shapes soil moisture downwind across South America. Air carries moisture from land surfaces over long distances, linking distant ecosystems. How much upwind plants contribute to downwind soil wetness had not been measured at continental scale.
Combining air trajectory data with deep learning, their model beat a local-only version, with upwind information supplying about two thirds of predictive power and vegetation about fifteen percent of it. Effects were stronger over farmland and followed major air transport corridors. In humid forests, canopy loss meant drier soils downwind. In semi-arid zones, some greening helped, but more greening eventually reversed the benefit.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Feini Huang, Shijie Jiang, Wei Shangguan, Gustau Camps-Valls, Alexander Winkler, Wantong Li, Gregory Duveiller, Christian Reimers, Wenli Zhao, Markus Reichstein, Yongjiu Dai |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 56 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |