Numerous estimates of water and energy balances depend on empirical equations requiring site-specific calibration, posing risks of "the right answers for the wrong reasons". We introduce novel first-principles formulations to calculate key quantities without requiring local calibration, matching predictions from complex land surface models.

We evaluated 10 representations of soil moisture stress in the JULES land surface model against site observations of GPP and latent heat flux. Increasing the soil depth and plant access to deep soil moisture improved many aspects of the simulations, and we recommend these settings in future work using JULES. In addition, using soil matric potential presents the opportunity to include parameters specific to plant functional type to further improve modeled fluxes.

This study examines the rainfall-runoff processes in micro-catchments in which a main source of variability is the contrasting land use. The study area is located in the Amazonian agricultural frontier, in the Brazilian Cerrado biome, and it aims to fill a gap in the literature concerning the Brazilian Cerrado, and to understand how streamflow and catchment hydrologic regimes are conditioned by microclimate, precipitation pattern, land cover and soil properties, among other catchment properties.