A simple approach to simulating land use impacts on regional climate

In order to feed and fuel the earth's population, croplands and pastures have expanded to occupy between 30-40% of earth's ice-free surface. Additionally, this conversion is continuing at a rate of 13 million ha per year (Foley 2005). This large-scale conversion of landscapes fundamentally alters the goods and services that an ecosystem provides, including near-surface climate regulation. In many cases it has been shown that for regional scale climate, shifts due to biogeophysical mechanisms can dwarf the signal associated with global climate change (citation).

In this research we present a computationally inexpensive model designed to assess the impact of global land use/land cover change scenarios on the surface energy balance and atmospheric boundary layer. This model is assessed by observational comparison at five sites located in ecologically dissimilar locations including a high-latitude boreal, mid-latitude mixed forest, mid-latitude grassland tropical savannah, and tropical forest sites. We find that this simple model adequately reproduces observed boundary layer meteorology, and appears to quantitatively assess the impacts of land cover change on surface energy balance and the lower atmosphere. This allows us to reexamine a climate regulation index defined by West et al. (2010) that describes how land cover change can affect the atmospheric loading of heat and moisture into the lower atmosphere while accounting for advected quantities.