Fig. 4: Drying effect of precipitation concentration in land-surface simulations.
From: More concentrated precipitation decreases terrestrial water storage
a, Effect of daily precipitation Gini coefficient (GP) on TWS, as simulated by an idealized land-surface model at a sample of around 1,500 grid points across the mean annual precipitation distribution (solid blue line). The dotted blue lines show 2 standard errors of the estimated fit between the TWS effect and climatological mean precipitation. The shaded dark and light orange areas show the 5th–95th and 25th–75th percentile ranges of the same simulated effects across a 243-member perturbed-parameter ensemble. The black lines show the full empirical TWS effect from Fig. 2b, averaged across the three precipitation data products, for comparison. b, GP effect on key water budget terms, including evaporation from surface water reservoirs (green), surface ponding rate (precipitation less infiltration, light blue), runoff (dark blue) and land evaporation (brown). c, Schematic visualizing the same GP effects on water budget terms as in b, on average across the mean annual precipitation domain. d, GP effect on TWS, as simulated by the MIROC6 and CNRM-CM6-1 climate models under the land-hist experiment (land component of the models forced by observations, 1960–2014) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 6, Land Surface, Snow and Soil Moisture Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6-LS3MIP)55.
