Title: Impact of land use change on the local climate over the Tibetan Plateau
Abstract: Impact of Land Use Change on the Local Climate Over the Tibetan Plateau Jiming Jin Departments of Watershed Sciences & Plants, Soils, and Climate, Utah State University, Logan, Utah Shihua Lu and Suosuo Li Cold and Arid regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, China Norman L. Miller Department of Geography, University of California at Berkeley, California & Earth Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California Abstract Observational data show that the remotely sensed leaf area index (LAI) has a significant downward trend over the east Tibetan Plateau (TP), while a warming trend is found in the same area. Further analysis indicates that this warming trend mainly results from the nighttime warming. The Single Column Atmosphere Model (SCAM) version 3.1 developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research is used to investigate the role of land use change in the TP local climate system and isolate the contribution of land use change to the warming. Two sets of SCAM simulations were performed at the Xinghai station that is located near the center of the TP Sanjiang (three rivers) Nature Reserve where the downward LAI trend is largest. These simulations were forced with the high and low LAIs. The modeling results indicate that when the LAI changes from high to low, the daytime temperature has a slight decrease, while the nighttime temperature increases significantly, which is consistent with the observations. The model further indicates that the nighttime temperature increase results from the less downward sensible heat flux that remains more energy in the near surface boundary layer and increases the temperature there. The more stable boundary layer is caused by the lower surface roughness length in the low LAI case than in the high LAI case. This modeling
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-08-09
Language: en
Type: article
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