Hydrological implications of vegetation-associated precipitation recycling during peak growing season over the Loess Plateau

Deng, Jiaxiang; Quan, Quan; Tang, Shuangcheng; Yang, Hanbo; Song, Xiaoyu

doi:10.5194/hess-30-5455-2026

Articles | Volume 30, issue 16

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-5455-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-5455-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 30, issue 16

Research article

|

27 Aug 2026

Research article |

| 27 Aug 2026

Hydrological implications of vegetation-associated precipitation recycling during peak growing season over the Loess Plateau

Jiaxiang Deng, Quan Quan, Shuangcheng Tang, Hanbo Yang, and Xiaoyu Song

Data sets

ERA5 hourly data on pressure levels from 1940 to present Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.bd0915c6

A High-Quality Reprocessed MODIS Leaf Area Index Dataset (HiQ-LAI) (Version 1) K. Yan et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8296768

China regional 250m fractional vegetation cover data set (2000-2024) J. Gao et al. https://doi.org/10.11888/Terre.tpdc.300330

Short summary

This study asks whether planting more vegetation on the Loess Plateau can bring enough extra rain to ease water shortages. By combining rainfall tracking with water balance analysis, we found that the added rain linked to vegetation is generally too small to make up for the extra water used by plant growth. Benefits are limited in sparsely vegetated areas and can turn negative where vegetation is dense, showing that restoration in dry regions has clear water limits.