Project Details
Projekt
Drivers and Impacts of Soil Hot Extremes - HotSOILs
Applicant
Dr. Almudena García-García
Subject Area
Soil Sciences
Atmospheric Science
Atmospheric Science
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 567560844
Heat extremes have been commonly investigated based on air temperatures, usually measured at 2 m above the land surface. A recent study has demonstrated that climate change is affecting heat extremes taking place in soil or in air differently. Thus, faster increases in the frequency and intensity of soil hot extremes than those taking place in the lower atmosphere have been reported over Europe based on the PI previous work. The fast increase in soil extreme temperatures could have devastating consequences for ecosystems health and services, by affecting soil microbiological activity and the health of plants below and above the ground surface. However, frameworks to monitoring and understanding soil hot extremes are still missing, compromising the physical understanding of land-vegetation-atmosphere interactions and the development of adaptation tools like early warning systems for vegetation failures. This is in part due to the lack of observational gridded products of soil temperatures. HotSOILs request funding for one PhD student position, who will address this limitation by producing the first sub-daily soil temperature product based on remote sensing products and machine learning algorithms. Using this new dataset, in-situ measurements, Earth observations and other modelling outputs, HotSOILs will also provide information about the drivers of changes in soil hot extremes, advancing our knowledge on land-vegetation-atmosphere feedbacks. Causal inference frameworks will be used to relate changes in soil hot extremes (or maximum soil temperatures during the hottest days of a year) with possible atmospheric and land drivers, such as surface radiation, surface and root-zone soil moisture, vegetation indices and terrestrial water storage. Additionally, the relationship between the evolution of soil hot extremes and vegetation health will be investigated using vegetation indices and characteristics from remote sensing products. Thus, HotSOILs will identify the contribution of soil hot extremes to vegetation health declines in forest and grassland ecosystems. HotSOILs will, therefore, advance our knowledge on the drivers and impacts of soil hot extremes. HotSOILs will provide useful code workflows, datasets and information useful for monitoring soil hot extremes and develop early warning systems.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
