Connection of Climate and Land Use in South-East Hungary

Abstract

The Hungarian Great Plain might be very sensitive to the presumed climate change, which may cause considerable changes in the climate of Hungary, too. The task indicated by the title of this study involves analysis of such regional characteristics, which demands an examination of the ecological and economic relations of given landscapes.\rThe study consists of two main parts. On the one hand the effects of climate variability influences on soil moisture were examined, on the other hand how temporal change of land use responds to regional climate was studied.\rIn the first part, on the basis of 110 years long data sets of both the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and soil moisture (Dunkel, 1994) it was demonstrated that at two characteristic stations of the region, Szeged and Szarvas, both parameters show a tendency to decrease. This conclusion, in addition to regular trend analysis of the whole period, was confirmed by significance analysis of differences between means of both share samples and those of the whole sample (Makra et al., 2000).\rShorter scale variability was examined for the whole year by using the monthly PDSI data of 17 stations in the region, in the period between 1952 and 1985, Spatial and temporal correlation for PDSI data sets were counted in April, June, August and October at the four stations examined.\rIn the second part of the study, the direct effects of change of sown area of plants on some components of the heat and water balance were analysed with data sets between 1951 and 1993. These calculations determined fluctuations of actual evapotranspiration and system albedo, respectively, given in areal average of Bekes and Csongrad counties.