The monitoring of soil moisture and sea surface salinity over the Earth has been profoundly enhanced during the last thirteen years due to a new generation of satellite sensors. L-band radiometry is currently the only technology providing direct measurements of soil moisture, insensitive to surface roughness and distribution of elements in the soil, and the only technology the only technology for measuring that allows us to me...

Vegetation cover creates competing effects on land surface temperature: it typically cools through enhancing energy dissipation and warms via decreasing surface albedo. Global vegetation has been previously found to overall net cool land surfaces with cooling contributions from temperate and tropical vegetation and warming contributions from boreal vegetation. Recent studies suggest that dryland vegetation across the tropics s...

Droughts in a warming climate have become more common and more extreme, making understanding forest responses to water stress increasingly pressing. Analysis of water stress in trees has long focused on water potential in xylem and leaves, which influences stomatal closure and water flow through the soil‐plant‐atmosphere continuum. At the same time, changes of vegetation water content (VWC) are linked to a range of tree respon...