Atmospheric simulation impacts due to Land Use and Land Cover Changes

Abstract

The weather and climate regional models are important tools for understanding the interactions between the biosphere and atmosphere, however its accuracy depends of realistic parameterizations of processes involving these variables. In most regional models, land cover and land use maps are not frequently updated and is outdated, influencing the results obtained from simulations of weather and climate. The land use and land cover changes modify the air temperature, precipitation, air moisture, energy balance and regional and global circulation. Consequently, the land use and land cover maps and its physical-chemical and biological properties are an important variable for numerical models of terrestrial systems. However, in majority regional weather and climate models, the land use and land cover map is not updated frequently, being out-of-date and influencing in the results of simulations. Therefore, this work has as main objective to analyze the impacts in numerical simulations of RegCM4 resulting of land use and land cover map updating used by the Biosphere Atmosphere Transfer Scheme (BATS). In addition, the update of the South America 2007 land use and land cover map used by BATS improves in 10% the simulation of precipitation, increasing from 0.84 to 0.92 the correlation coefficient (significant at p <0.05, Student’s t-test). Moreover, there is a good agreement of simulations regarding the maximum and minimum temperature, with correlation coefficients near to 0.95 and very close to the observed values.