Bridging the Gap Between Policy‐Driven Land Use Changes and Regional Climate Projections

Abstract

Changes in the land surface interact with a changing climate. Moreover, the impact of land surface changes on the local and regional climate can be as large as the impact of increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The land surface‐climate interactions are best represented by high‐resolution models to capture the mesoscale circulation features. The future land surface changes are preferably represented by scenarios that illustrate plausible storylines. Furthermore, the impact of future urbanization is relevant for the highly urbanized region of Europe. In this study, we assess the interactions between climate and land surface dynamics by modeling the near‐future climate state for western Europe based on a policy‐driven land use change scenario at high resolution. The global climate model CNRM‐CM5.1 has been downscaled to the regional climate of western Europe by using ALARO‐SURFEX at 4‐km horizontal resolution. SURFEX provides a parameterization of the urban physical properties so that the impact of urban surfaces on the regional climate can be modeled realistically. Results are interpreted with respect to the near‐future climate change without land surface changes. The near future presents a uniform temperature increase of 0.3–0.6 °C. This is in contrast to changes by the land surface that are more heterogeneous in space and much stronger at the local scale. Deforestation and conversion to arable land diminishes climate change effects, whereas urbanization results in an enhancing effect of climate change. Moreover, urbanization is as big as the radiative forcing warming for minimum temperature.

Regional climate downscaling over Europe: perspectives from the EURO-CORDEX community

“…Land use change (including land cover and/or land management changes) is an important anthropogenic forcing on climate, and its direct biophysical effect on temperature can locally or regionally be of the same order of magnitude as the effect from global greenhouse gas forcing, but there are still uncertainties in magnitude and sign of many land-induced changes (de Noblet-Ducoudré et al 2012; Lejeune et al 2017;Perugini et al 2017;Cherubini et al 2018). Even more important for impact studies, many numerical experiments have highlighted the strong impact land uses may have on extreme events (e.g., Pitman et al 2012;Davin et al 2014;Thiery et al 2017;Lejeune et al 2018;Berckmans et al 2019).…”

Future Climate Change Impact on Urban Heat Island in Two Mediterranean Cities Based on High-Resolution Regional Climate Simulations

“…Many recent studies show that especially minimum temperature may be regionally amplified due to urbanization under present or future conditions [67][68][69][70][71]. As an illustration, the authors of [72] report that an urbanization scenario would increase minimum temperature in European urban areas by +0.6 • C until 2035, which is fairly comparable to the temperature change suggested by the RCP 8.5 scenario. Some of the previously mentioned studies conclude that the temperature over rural areas increases more significantly than in the urban ones.…”

The State-of-the-Art of Urban Climate Change Modeling and Observations

“…However, the contribution and feedback processes by urban heat island and climate change are not taken into account because of the offline nature of these simulations. Finally, there is clear evidence, showing that future urbanization will increase air temperature in different areas (Mahmood et al 2014) under both present Kaplan et al 2017;Li et al 2018b) or future climate conditions (Georgescu et al 2013;Argüeso et al 2014;Kim et al 2016;Kusaka et al 2016;Grossman-Clarke et al 2017), especially on the minimum temperatures that could be comparable to the climate change signal of the near future (up to 2035) over western Europe (+ 0.6 °C;Berckmans et al 2019).…”