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on regional climate. In the next study, we aim to simulate the climatological
changes caused by future grassland change in Mongolia under Representative
Concentration Pathways (RCPs) for the years 2010-2020 and 2040-2050.
In terms of the urbanization impacts on climate in developed megalopolis, there
are still no sufficient evidences for understanding the relationships between future
urban expansion and regional climate at the scale of megalopolis, whose urban
area are still expanding, such as New York, Beijing, Seoul, Chicago, and Moscow.
Therefore, we present some evidences for supporting the effects of future urban
expansion on regional climate based on the model simulation of precipitation and
temperature in the Northeast megalopolis of the United States of America (USA).
7.1 Potential Climate Impacts of Land Reclamation
in India
India is a typical region of the reclamation of cultivated land in the global land use
and land cover change (Delucchi). Cultivated land expansion is usually caused by
the intermediate needs of the growing population. According to the fifteenth
population survey in 2011, the total population of India has exceeded 1.21 billion,
accounting for 17.5 % of the world population and ranking second all over the
world. It is assumed that the population of India is expected to exceed that of
China in 2030 (Kunzig
2011
). The continuous population growth has posed a great
challenge to the food security, so Indians have progressively reclaimed the cul-
tivated land while promoting modern agriculture so as to meet the domestic food
demand. Subsequently, these large scale anthropogenic reclamation leads to the
land use and land cover changes, which inevitably influences the exchange and
distribution of the energy, moisture, and momentum between the biosphere and
atmosphere, and affects the radiation balance and water cycle (Feddema et al.
2005
; Pielke et al.
2002
). Hence, this study attempts to quantitatively project the
potential biogeophysical effects caused by the future large-scale reclamation of
cultivated land with the WRF model performance.
7.1.1 Model and Data
7.1.1.1 Simulation Schemes
The simulation domain is illustrated in Fig.
7.1
. The spatial resolution of land cover
maps is 30 km 9 30 km, and there were 79 grid cells in the east-west direction and
111 grid cells in the north-south direction in the whole simulation area (Only a small
eastern part of India is not included in the study area). The temporal duration of the
WRF simulation is set to 2010-2050 in this study. The parameterization schemes
mainly include the Noah land surface parameterization scheme (Ek et al.
2003
),
