Data for: Earlier leaf senescence dates are constrained by soil moisture

The unprecedented warming that has occurred in recent decades has led to later autumn leaf senescence dates (LSD) throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Yet, great uncertainties still exist regarding the strength of these delaying trends, especially in terms of how soil moisture affects them. Here we show that changes in soil moisture in 1982–2015 had a substantial impact on autumn LSD in one fifth of the vegetated areas in the Northern Hemisphere (>30° N), and how it contributed more to LSD variability than either temperature, precipitation or radiation. We developed a new model based on soil-moisture-constrained cooling degree days (CDDSM) to characterize the effects of soil moisture on LSD and compared its performance with the cooling degree days (CDD), Delpierre (DM) and spring-influenced autumn (SIAM) models. We show that the CDDSM model with inputs of temperature and soil moisture outperformed the three other models for LSD modelling and had an overall higher correlation coefficie..., See the Methods section in the original paper.,