Groundwater processes in high resolution large-scale water cycle simulations

Groundwater lateral flow at local scales, from hilltops to valleys is responsible for much of the heterogeneity of the water table depth across the landscape at the regional scale. The gradient in accessibility to groundwater related to topography creates patterns in soil moisture and vegetation, and hence land surface fluxes, that can only be resolved and simulated at high resolution. In this talk we discuss how these emerging patterns from process-based high-resolution land-surface models are important to terrestrial water and energy cycles, ecology and climate in general. We will show results that highlight this importance from large-scale groundwater-soil-vegetation-atmosphere fully coupled simulations.