Soil moisture and vegetation memories in a cold, arid climate

Continental climate is established as a result of a complex interplay between the atmosphere and various land-surface systems such as the biosphere, soil, hydrosphere, and cryosphere. These systems function as climate memory, allowing the maintenance of interannual atmospheric anomalies. In this paper, we present new observational evidence of an interseasonal moisture memory mechanism mediated by the land surface that is manifested in the coupled cold and arid climate of Mongolia. Interannual anomalies of soil moisture and vegetation due to rainfall during a given summer are maintained through the freezing winter months to the spring, acting as an initial condition for subsequent summer land-surface and rainfall conditions. Both the soil moisture and vegetation memories were prominent over the eastern part of the Mongolian steppe zone (103–112°E and 46–50°N). That is, the cold-season climate with low evapotranspiration and strong soil freezing acts to prolong the decay time scale of autumn soil moisture anomalies to 8.2 months that is among the longest in the world. The vegetation also has a memory of the similar time scale, likely because the large rootstock of the perennial plants dominant in the Mongolian steppe may remain alive, retain belowground biomass anomalies during the winter, and have an impact on the initial vegetation growth during the spring.