Spatial variation of surface energy fluxes due to land use changes across China

Abstract

We estimate the heat flux changes caused by the projected land transformation over the next 40 years across China to improve the understanding of the impacts of land dynamics on regional climate. We use the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to investigate these impacts in four representative land transformation zones, where reclamation, overgrazing, afforestation, and urbanization dominates the land use and land cover changes in each zone respectively. As indicated by the significant variance of albedo due to different land use and cover changes, different surface properties cause great spatial variance of the surface flux. From the simulation results, latent heat flux increases by 2 and 21 W/m2 in the reclamation and afforestation regions respectively. On the contrary, overgrazing and urban expansion results in decrease of latent heat flux by 5 and 36 W/m2 correspondingly. Urban expansion leads to an average increase of 40 W/m2 of sensible heat flux in the future 40 years, while reclamation, afforestation, as well as overgrazing result in the decrease of sensible heat flux. Results also show that reclamation and overgrazing lead to net radiation decrease by approximately 4 and 7 W/m2 respectively, however, afforestation and urbanization lead to net radiation increase by 6 and 3 W/m2 respectively. The simulated impacts of projected HLCCs on surface energy fluxes will inform sustainable land management and climate change mitigation. © 2014 by the authors.