%0 Journal Article
%T Simulated Effects of Cropland Expansion on Summer Climate in Eastern China in the Last Three Centuries
%A Quansheng Ge
%A Jingyun Zheng
%A Xuezhen Zhang
%A Fanneng He
%J Advances in Meteorology
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/501014
%X To understand the effects of the land use/cover changes due to agricultural development on summer climate in Eastern China, four 12-year simulations using the WRF-SSiB model were performed. We found that agricultural development resulted in warming and rainy effects. In the middle to lower reaches of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, the warming effects were approximately 0.6ˇăC and resulted from increased surface net radiation and sensible heat fluxes. In Northeast China, the warming effects were very small due to increases in latent heat fluxes which resulted from the extensive conversion from grassland to cropland. The rainy effect resulted from increases in convective rainfall, which was associated with a warming surface in certain areas of the Yellow River and Yangtze River and a large increase in the surface moisture flux in Northeast China. Conversely, in the middle to lower reaches of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, the grid-scale rainfall decreased because the climatological northward wind, which is moist and warm, was partially offset by a southward wind anomaly. These findings suggest that the agricultural development left footprints not only on the present climate but also on the historical climate changes before the industrial revolution. 1. Introduction Eastern China is affected by the Asian monsoon [1]. In this area, summer is the warmest and wettest season. The heat and rainfall in summer feed agriculture for human welfare. Therefore, the summer climate has crucial implications to the originations and development of agriculture in East China [2]. The agriculture in Eastern China potentially extends back thousands of years [3]. Agricultural development converts land cover from natural vegetation (e.g., forest, grassland, and wetland) to anthropogenic cropland. Such conversions may lead to changes in surface parameters, including albedo, emissivity, and roughness and therefore may have important climatic implications [4, 5]. As a result, as a by-product of agricultural development, the summer climate might be modified. The current summer climate might therefore include a human dimension. Studying the effects of agricultural development would be valuable for understanding ˇ°naturalˇ± summer climate to improve our predictability of future scenarios. Many studies attempted to use past history to reveal the effects of human-induced land cover changes (HLCCs) on regional climate [6]. According to the experimental design, these simulation-based studies can be classified into two categories. The first category focused on the climatic
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amete/2013/501014/