Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
respective fields, and there are few researches on their joint effects on climate.
However, there are still a lot of uncertainties in the current knowledge, and it is still
very difficult to objectively assess the contribution of land use changes to climate
change. For example, IPCC (Pachauri and Reisinger
2007
) believed that the
increase of CO
2
in the atmosphere will reinforce radiative forcing, 1/3 of which was
contributed by land use changes, and consequently increase the temperature. So it is
of great importance to objectively analyze the biogeochemical and biogeophysical
effects of land use changes on surface climate (Foley et al.
2005
). It is necessary to
carry out further researches on the development of more accurate monitoring and
modeling methods, which are essential to the understanding of these interactions
and feedbacks (Bathiany et al.
2010
). However, how to integrate biogeophysical and
biogeochemical processes is the major challenge in current studies.
The impacts of land use changes on climate are the synthetic effects of biogeo-
physical process and biogeochemical process. But which of the two kinds of pro-
cesses makes a greater contribution to climate change at regional scale, or which one
plays a dominant role? What effects will the improvement of the regional climate
model have on LUCC simulation? This chapter reviewed the history and methods of
the relevant researches, and summarized the influence of LUCC on regional climate
system and the simulation strategies according to the researches in recent decades.
Finally, the application of regional climate models in the development and man-
agement of agricultural land and urban land are discussed.
1.2 Mechanism Research on the Influence of LUCC
on Surface Climate
The research on the influence of land use changes on surface temperature and
precipitation can be dated back to the 1970s. Land use changes can alter various
physical characteristics of land surface, including parameters such as albedo
(Dirmeyer and Shukla
1994
), upward long-wave radiation and surface roughness
and vegetation parameters such as vegetation coverage and leaf area index (LAI).
All changes of these parameters perturb surface energy budget, water balance and
atmospheric boundary layer (Lambert et al.
2011
). So it can be said that changes in
the parameters of land surface and vegetation is the fundamental reason for the
effects of land use changes on the atmosphere (Brovkin et al.
1999
). By the 1980s,
researchers realized that land use influences the climate not only through the change
in physical characteristics of the land surface, but also the amount of greenhouse
emission. Thereafter, there were more and more researches on the effects of land use
on carbon cycle. The influence of land use changes on the climate involves not only
biogeophysical process, but also biogeochemical process.
