Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
representative land use changes, e.g., deforestation in the tropic zone, desertifi-
cation, irrigation of the cultivated land and urbanization.
Although there have been many consentaneous conclusions in many aspects of
the current researches, there is still great uncertainty in the simulation of LUCC
effects on the regional climate. First, the climate system contains multi-scale
dynamics and interactions between multiple weather systems. Second, there is
great variation in the influence of land use changes in different regions of climate
system. Therefore, in order to reduce the uncertainty in these relevant researches,
on one hand, it is necessary to precisely examine and depict the parameters of
LUCC and other parameters of land surface, which depends on the development of
remote sensing techniques. On the other hand, it is still necessary to strengthen the
research on land surface process. It not only requires mathematical-physical
models that can effectively simulate the interaction between land surface and the
atmosphere, but also needs to improve the observation techniques so as to
understand the essence of land surface process and provide reasonable initial value
parameters for mathematical-physical models.
Urbanization has significant influence on local climate, e.g., urban heat island
effect due to the urbanization and the effects of urban aerosol on precipitation.
However, since the area of the city is generally very small, it is difficult to
parameterize the urban land surface due to its great complexity, and there have
been no researches on the simulation of urbanization process in regional climate
models, either. In fact, with the development of the society and economy, urban
population will continually increase and urban area will further expand, and
consequently the effects of urbanization on the climate will be more and more
important. The assessment and prediction of the influence of urbanization will be
one of the major directions in the relevant researches in the future.
As the intersection between the researches on land use changes and climate
change, the researches on climate effects of future land use changes mainly focus
on two important issues. Firstly, great efforts have been made to understand the
climate effects of past and current LUCC, however, there have been very few
researches for future LUCC. Secondly, how to predict land use changes in the
future and assess its influence on future climate may become a hot issue in the
relevant research fields.
References
Arora VK, Montenegro A (2011) Small temperature benefits provided by realistic afforestation
efforts. Nat Geosci 4(8):514-518
Bathiany S, Claussen M, Brovkin V, Raddatz T, Gayler V (2010) Combined biogeophysical and
biogeochemical effects of large-scale forest cover changes in the MPI earth system model.
Biogeosci Discuss 7(1):387-428
