Where does water go when it doesn’t flow?

Former lab member Stephen Good just published an article in Science. For this paper, Stephen and his collaborators used water vapor isotope data from TES along with other datasets, like the GPCP and OAFlux, to provide a global estimate of evapo-transpiration partitioning. While the details can be found in the paper, the general result is that: 64 % of the water is transpired by vegetation • 6 % evaporates from soils • 3 % evaporates from lakes, streams and rivers • The other 27 % are being intercepted by vegetation.

The article is already getting some press around the www (see here, here or here), and will without doubt be a key study for future research on ecohydrology at the global scale. A good summary of the article is also provided in the “perspective” article by Renee Brooks, published in the same issue of Science.