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The impact of land use change at ShanGanNing Border areas on climate
with RegCM3 Study
Xueli Shi(1), Yiming Liu(1), and Jianping Liu(2)
(1) National Climate Ceneter, China Meteorological Administration, No.46 Zhongguancun Nandajie, Haidian District,
Beijing 100081, P.R. China; shixl@cma.gov.cn
(2) Ningxia Meteorological Bureau, Ningxia, P.R. China
1. Abstract
The land use and land cover change can impact
regional/local climate through land-atmosphere interactions.
In this paper, the land use change impacts of the “conversion
of cropland to forest” at the ShanGanNing Border Areas
(SGNBA) in Western China were investigated by using the
regional climate model (RegCM3) simulation experiments.
Two sets of simulations are conducted with the same largescale
forcing data from NCEP/NCAR reanalysis II dataset.
The control simulation use the original model land cover
dataset used in standard RegCM3 simulations, which are
noted as CTL. In another set, the yearly updated remote
dataset in the “key SBA area” are used for the simulation,
which are noted as MOD. Besides the assessment of the
CTL performance, differences between the MOD and CTL
will also be presented to understand the climate effects of
the land use change.
2. Introduction
The impacts of land use and land cover change on climate
have been and still will be the study interests all around the
world, such as Correia et al. (2008) in Amazonia and
Douglas et al. (2006)) at the Indian Monsoon belt. Pielke et
al. (2007) presented an overview on their regional impacts
on rainfall. In East Asia and China, Fu et al. (2001) studied
the impacts of recovering natural vegetation on summer
climate and environmental conditions in East Asia. Zhang
and Gao (2009) investigated the atmospheric dynamical
response to land-use change with general circulation model
and regional climate model.
But not too many models studies are focused on the
SGNBA because of the limitation of available dataset and
complicated features of climate, land-surface and sensitive
ecosystem. The returning natural forest in SGNBA has
started from 1999 in China aimed at improving the
conditions there. But how much are the change and their
impacts? In our work, the land cover mapping obtained from
remote sensing was used to quantify land cover change
during March – October from 1999 to 2007 in the SGNBA.
The dataset are introduced into the RegCM3 (Pal et al., 2007)
to study their impacts on climate.
The model has a 20km horizental resolution, with the model
domain including part of the high land in the west (Figure 1).
The key area (SGNBA) is located at center of model domain,
which is also the region where the land cover dataset is
replaced. The CTL simulation has proven the model
performance in reproducing the basic climate features.
Differences between MOD and CTL shown the significant
effects of land cover change at the key area, which will be
presented during the meeting.
Figure 1. The model domain and terrain height.
(Unit: m)
References
Correia F.W.S., Alvala R.C.S., and Manzi A.O., 2008:
Modeling the impacts of land cover change in
Amazonia: a regional climate model (RCM)
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Douglas E., Niyogi D. and Frolking S., et al., Changes in
moisture and irrigation in the Indian Monsoon, belt,
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Fu C.B., Yuan H.L., A virtual numerical experiment to
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628, 2007
Pal J.S., et al., Regional climate modeling for the
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Pielke R.A., Adegoke J., and Beltran-przekurat A., et al.,
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