Warming/cooling effect of cropland expansion during the 1900s ~ 2010s in the Heilongjiang Province, Northeast of China

• Published in: International journal of biometeorology Vol. 66; no. 7; pp. 1379 - 1390
• Main Authors: Jiang, Lanqi, Zhang, Hongwen, Zhao, Fang, Zhang, Lijuan, Wang, Xiaodi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.07.2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Agricultural land; Air temperature; Animal Physiology; Biological and Medical Physics; Biophysics; Climate; Climate change; Cooling; Cooling effects; Earth and Environmental Science; Environment; Environmental Health; Grasslands; Land cover; Land use; Meteorology; Net radiation; Original Paper; Plant Physiology; Radiation; Radiation flux; Reflectance; Regional climates; Surface temperature; Temperature; Temperature changes; Temperature effects; Weather forecasting; China; Heilongjiang China; Climate change; WRF model; 1900s ~ 2010s; Cropland expansion; Heilongjiang Province
• ISSN: 0020-7128; 1432-1254
• DOI: 10.1007/s00484-022-02283-5

Land cover change (LCC) significantly changed the local/regional temperature. This paper attempts to reveal the effects of cropland expansion in different ways on temperature change from the 1900s to 2010s in Heilongjiang Province. To reach this goal, we conducted four simulation research schemes with the coupled Weather Research and Forecast (WRF)-Noah model to investigate the warming/cooling effect of cropland expansion. The results show that cropland expansion exerted different effects with different land-use type conversions. In the last century, the areas with grassland-to-cropland and wetland-to-cropland transition show the warming effect, and the average surface temperature in Heilongjiang Province increased by 0.023 ℃ and 0.024 ℃, respectively. The areas with forest-to-cropland transition show the cooling effect, in which the average temperature decreased by 0.103 ℃. The variation of air temperature is mainly caused by the variation of surface reflectance and surface net radiation flux. The results provide evidence that cropland expansion changes to biophysical landscape characteristics, warming/cooling the land surface and thus enhancing/reducing the temperature, and lead to regional climate change eventually.