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Abstract:
The Indian region experiences an atmosphere-ocean-land driven phenomenon known as Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) characterized by abundant precipitation, a crucial source for the hydrological cycle are greatly explored on a large-scale forcing. There is still much to discover about local scale processes that affect the hydrological cycle, such as interactions between the land and atmosphere under the influence of natural or human forcing. The interactions between soil and vegetation have an impact on the hydrological cycle, the atmosphere, and CO2 uptake mainly through evapotranspiration (ET). It is crucial to understand how processes that are natural or caused by human intervention can affect the uptake of carbon and ET. Further, it is observed that ET persists over post-monsoon period which is also responsible for the ecosystem productivity in drier period. Such features are not yet explored due to the lack of understanding.Here, with satellite data and observations, we demonstrate how the soil-vegetation continuum can functions as a natural water capacitor, storing the monsoon pulse and releasing the moisture to the atmosphere through ET particularly in dry periods. We discovered that the post-monsoon terrestrial water cycle over India is driven by the water held by the soil-plant continuum and it is dependent on the preceding precipitation or other input as forced by humans (irrigation). For different land-use cover, we have explored how unique soil-vegetation capacitor effect can have specific role in maintaining the land-atmosphere interactions during drier periods where rainfall is very scanty or scattered or there is human forcing.
