Hydrological implications of vegetation-associated precipitation recycling during peak growing season over the Loess Plateau

Abstract. Vegetation restoration on the Loess Plateau has raised an important question of whether enhanced land–atmosphere coupling can alleviate regional water scarcity in this water-limited environment. In this study, we integrate the WAM-2layers atmospheric moisture-tracking model with a random forest–enhanced Budyko framework and introduced a vegetation-weighted leaf area index (LAIw) to examine vegetation-associated precipitation recycling and its hydrological effects during the peak growing season (July–August during 2000–2022). Results show that precipitation is dominated by terrestrial moisture sources (86.5 %), while oceanic contributions account for 13.5 %. Internal moisture recycling contributes 14.4 % of total precipitation but exhibits a trend of −0.073 mm yr−1. At the regional mean scale, vegetation-associated recycled precipitation has a limited effect on precipitation, evapotranspiration, and surface water availability (0.059 %, 0.02 %, and 0.107 %, respectively), reflecting strong compensation between positive and negative vegetation effects and the limited fraction of internal recycling. However, a clear regime shift emerges along the LAIw gradient, from weakly positive effects under low vegetation density to increasingly negative effects under high vegetation density. These findings suggest that under water-limited conditions, enhanced vegetation–atmosphere coupling does not necessarily increase surface water availability, but instead reflects a constrained redistribution of water within a monsoon–continental transition system characterized by nonlinear vegetation density–dependent regime shifts.