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.
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.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Hydrological implications of vegetation-associated precipitation recycling during peak growing season over the Loess Plateau
Jiaxiang Deng
State Key Laboratory of Water Engineering Ecology and Environment in Arid Area, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, China
Quan Quan
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR
State Key Laboratory of Water Engineering Ecology and Environment in Arid Area, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, China
Shuangcheng Tang
College of Hydraulic Science and Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, China
Hanbo Yang
Department of Hydraulic Engineering, School of Civil Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Xiaoyu Song
State Key Laboratory of Water Engineering Ecology and Environment in Arid Area, Xi'an University of Technology, Xi'an, China
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Revised manuscript not accepted
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A long-term (1980–2020) global ET product is generated based on a collocation-based merging method. The produced Collocation-Analyzed Multi-source Ensembled Land Evapotranspiration Data (CAMELE) performed well over different vegetation coverage against in-situ data. For global comparison, the spatial distribution of multi-year average and annual variation were in consistent with inputs.The CAMELE products is freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6283239 (Li et al., 2021).
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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.
This study asks whether planting more vegetation on the Loess Plateau can bring enough extra...