This study investigates the principal modes of seasonal moisture flux transport over North America, the North and South Hemispheres and the globe, analyzing their possible dependence on large scale atmospheric circulation patterns. It uses fifty-four years (1948 - 2001) of vertically integrated six-hourly data from the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis I Project.  Orthogonally rotated principal component analysis (RPCA) is implemented to identify the dominant modes. For every season, the characteristic spatial pattern of the most dominant modes is compared to the geopotential height anomaly field. The height anomaly field is calculated as a composite of the years that score above or below one standard deviation  in the yearly scores of the selected moisture flux mode. The geopotential height patterns are then compared to well known large-scale circulation patterns.
Reference: Masters Thesis by Francina Dominguez (UIUC 2003).

The soil moisture movement occurs only the vertical direction in most current SVAT(Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Transfer) models.  The spatial heterogeneity in the soil moisture distribution should be considered by the surface and subsurface runoffs controlled by the effects of topographic variations parameterized through the probability distribution function of the topographic index on terrestrial hydrologic process.  The CLM(Common Land Model) for the SVAT scheme will be coupled with a basin-scale runoff model(TOPMODEL) in this research.  The surface data, such as land cover/use type, fractional vegetation cover, ecological characteristics, soil texture, soil color type, ocean and lake floor, etc, are collected and developed by ArcGIS for the CLM input.  Each surface data with various resolutions and map projections is converted into 30km-resoltion data with the Lambert Conformal Conic projection for the RCM(Regional Climate Model) - WRF(Weather Research and Forecasting) model - grid domain.