<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v3.0 20080202//EN" "https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/nlm-dtd/publishing/3.0/journalpublishing3.dtd">
<article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="research-article" specific-use="SMUR" dtd-version="3.0" xml:lang="en">
<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-2673</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Distinct spatiotemporal responses of soil-vegetation-hydrology to warming from 2005&amp;ndash;2022 and predicting air temperature of provincial spatial scale using Kolmogorov-Arnold graph convolutional network in mainland China</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Xu</surname>
<given-names>Junjie</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yu</surname>
<given-names>Yilei</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Yang</surname>
<given-names>Lihu</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wei</surname>
<given-names>Xin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>School of Eco-Environment, Hebei University, Baoding, Hebei, 071000, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Key Laboratory of Land Water Cycle and Surface Processes, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>College of Ecology and Environment, Institute of Disaster Prevention Science and Technology, Sanhe, Hebei, 065201, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>22</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>33</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Junjie Xu et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2673/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2673/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2673/egusphere-2026-2673.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-2673/egusphere-2026-2673.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>&lt;p style=&quot;font-weight: 400;&quot;&gt;Under global warming, accurately predicting regional temperature and understanding the response mechanisms of multi-dimensional environmental variables are crucial for climate adaptation. This study integrates multi-source remote sensing, reanalysis, and ground observation data to construct a monthly provincial-scale environmental dataset for China covering 2005&amp;ndash;2022. Long-term trend analysis reveals a widespread increase in Mean Annual Temperature (MAT), which has enhanced vegetation activity, evidenced by rising NDVI and GPP, with rapid responses (0&amp;ndash;1 month lag) especially in eastern humid regions. Conversely, deep soil moisture (100&amp;ndash;289&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;cm) has declined in northern China, exhibiting lags of up to 5&amp;ndash;6 months, indicating prolonged soil drying under sustained warming. Shallow soil moisture (0&amp;ndash;7&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;cm) shows variable lags, concentrated in the Yangtze River basin and Southwest China, while soil temperature responds within 0&amp;ndash;3 months. Groundwater levels display weak direct correlation with air temperature. To capture complex spatial dependencies and non-linear interactions, we construct a provincial graph based on real geographic adjacency and develop a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) coupled with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN). The KAN-GCN model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the 2021&amp;ndash;2022 test period (R&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;=&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;0.9889, RMSE&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;=&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;1.18&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;&amp;deg;C), reducing MAE by 15&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;%&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;&amp;ndash;&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;30&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;% in ecologically fragile regions such as Xinjiang and Qinghai compared to conventional MLP-GCN. Feature importance analysis consistently identifies surface soil temperature (0&amp;ndash;7&lt;span&gt;&amp;thinsp;&lt;/span&gt;cm) as the most critical predictor, highlighting the pivotal role of soil-atmosphere thermal coupling. Furthermore, Local Indicators of Spatial Association (LISA) error clustering confirms that KAN-GCN eliminates the persistent high-error clusters observed with MLP-GCN over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, demonstrating superior spatial robustness and predictive reliability.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="33"/></counts>
</article-meta>
</front>
<body/>
<back>
</back>
</article>