Correction to: Nature Geoscience https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-01114-x. Published online 6 February 2022.

In the version of this article initially published, the y-axis labels in Figure 4a,c were duplicates of the x-axis labels and have been amended to read “Mean annual soil moisture (kg kg–1)” in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.