Abstract

Soil moisture has a significant effect on precipitation patterns. In many parts of the world this feedback is negative, meaning rain is more likely over drier soil, which is not captured by non-convection permitting climate models. The aim of this project is to investigate the Soil Moisture Precipitation Feedback in Austria and quantify its influence on rainfall. Analysis of precipitation events and preceding rainfall as proxy for soil moisture conditions show a strong positive feedback, presumably due to strong synoptic influences in the Alpine region. To get more reliable soil moisture data, the High Resolution Land Data Assimilation System is used and run with observational forcing data. This data shows discrepancies from observational data, because of coarse soil texture classification in the land surface model. Further, the method to quantify the feedback, applied by Taylor et al. (2012), Guillod et al. (2015) and Moon et al. (2019), is presented in detail.​