Invited Presentation: Urban Land use – land cover feedbacks on regional climate – Current Understanding, Future needs

The presentation will provide an overview of the current understanding regarding the impacts of urban land use – land cover feedbacks on regional climate with emphasis on the precipitation processes. Taking examples from different observational and modeling based synthesis studies involving short term weather forecasts to multi decadal analysis, a summary of land – atmosphere interaction processes as they affect rainfall and mesoscale convection will be presented. With rapid and largescale urbanization and associated land transformations, the mesoscale responses appear to have significant organized feedback that can affect regional convergence patterns, gradients in surface boundary layer parameters, and regional convection potential. These feedbacks in turn can modulate the convective as well as largescale precipitation patterns via changes in the timing, intensity, location, and duration of rainfall events. Discussions will also center around the role of aerosol/cloud based thermodynamic feedback and land surface heterogeneity based dynamical feedback affecting convection and mesoscale rainfall changes and the uncertainties that need to be addressed in future studies.