ABSTRACT

Humans have fundamentally altered the mass and energy fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere. As the world’s population continues to grow, meeting the basic food and water needs of the increased population will require accurate and near-real-time monitoring of water and diminishing resources. The only viable way to do this is through the use of satellite technologies (Wang and Dickinson 2012). However, these observations are collected at certain spatial resolutions that may (or may not) have anything to do with the spatial resolutions of the underlying processes controlling water and energy cycling between the surface and atmosphere. This is one particular aspect of the so-called scaling problem that must be addressed in order to accurately monitor and predict the cycling of water (Anderson et al. 2003; Brunsell and Gillies 2003b; McCabe and Wood 2006; Wu and Li 2009).