Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cropland and pasture owns the largest area among the four kinds of cultivated land,
reaching nearly 1.18 million km
2
(56.76 % of the total cultivated land area), mainly
located in Gangetic Plain, Malwa Plateau, and the northern part of Deccan Plateau.
The irrigated cropland and pasture ranks second with the coverage of 0.67 million
km
2
(32.10 % of the total cultivated land area), and it is mainly distributed in the
northern part of Indus plain, eastern part of India Peninsula, and the coastal plain in
the southern part of India. There are only a few cropland/grassland mosaics
(9.82 %) in the northern part of Indus plain and the middle part of India Peninsula,
and the cropland/woodland mosaic is kept with the least area (1.32 %), which is
sparsely distributed in the coastal area in the southwest part of India (Fig.
7.1
a).
According to the projected land cover data in 2010-2050, the total conversion
area of the cultivated land will be about 1.16 million km
2
, and changed cells cover
most part of India except Gangetic Plain and the coastal area in the southeast part of
India, including the conversion from other land use types into the cultivated land as
well as the conversion from the dryland cropland into the irrigated cropland
(Fig.
7.1
b). The dominated land use change is the conversion from the dryland
cropland into the irrigated cropland, accounting for 50.23 % of the total conversion
area. The corresponding converted grid cells are mainly located in the flat regions,
e.g., Indus Pain and the middle part of India Peninsula. Additionally, the cells of
conversion from other land use types into the irrigated cropland (48.15 % of the
total conversion area) mainly distributes in the plain and coastal area in the
northeast part of Eastern Ghats Mountain, the northern part of Western Ghats
Mountain, and some undeveloped regions with certain water sources in the
southwest part of India. In the second conversion type, 93 % of the expanded
cultivated land is from grassland and shrub, with only 7 % from forest. The least
proportion of changed land is converted from other land use types into the dryland
cropland, and only sparsely distributed in Malwa Plateau. Totally, there has been a
large proportion of dryland cropland in India, and most of them will be changed into
the irrigated land with higher productivity due to the improvement of the irrigation
conditions, progress of irrigation techniques, and increase of the food demand.
7.1.2.2 Model Validation
The result indicates that the maximum temperature of both the historical data and
the simulation result appears around March, while the minimum occurs in
November. The decrease rate during the period from September to November is a
little bit higher than that during January and March (Fig.
7.2
).
The simulation result showed that the modeled temperature is lower than the
observations on the whole. Specifically, the observed data indicate the annual daily
average temperature is 29.06 C, while the simulation result is 27.70 C. As for
the monthly temperature change, the simulated temperature is lower than the
observed one in all months except February, and the difference in September is the
most significant, reaching 2.69 C. With regard to the seasonal change, the sim-
ulated temperature is less than the observations of all seasons except the winter.
