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 compare the results to the performance of the CCLM and WRF RCMs. To get more reliable soil moisture data, the High Resolution Land Data Assimilation System is used and run with observational forcing data. Its soil moisture output, as well as soil moisture data from the RCMs are compared to the WegenerNet observation data. Further, the method to quantify the feedback, adapted from Taylor et al. (2012), Guillod et al. (2015) and Moon et al. (2019), is presented. Due to flaws in the result representation of this method, a more detailed look into the feedback strength distribution of ​precipitation events is also taken, showing no or only ​weak feedbacks in Austria.