Impacts of Historical Land Use/Cover Change (1980–2015) on Summer Climate in the Aral Sea Region

Abstract

Land surface processes form a dynamic boundary interface within the climate system (Pielke & Niyogi, 2010). Land surface characteristics determine the surface energy balance by assigning the distribution of net radiation into sensible, latent, and ground heat fluxes (Dickinson, 1983). Surface fluxes not only affect temperature and humidity, but also influence wind field and local circulation pattern (Pielke & Niyogi, 2009). Therefore, the land use/cover change (LUCC) is one of the driving forces of the regional and global climate change (Cao et al., 2015; Stocker et al., 2014). LUCC can affect global and regional climate by means of changing biogeochemistry and biogeophysical properties of terrestrial surface and its associated effect on atmosphere (Kabat et al., 2004). The biogeochemistry effects of LUCC on global climate in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and carbon assimilation are well studied in the literature (Li, Zhang, et al., 2015; Meinshausen et al., 2009). According to the IPCC AR5, GHG has caused a 0.5-1.3 °C average global surface warming from 1951 to 2012 (Brovkin et al., 2004; Lawrence et al., 2012). However, the climate response to changing biogeophysical properties of terrestrial surface still exits uncertainty, due to regional climate change can be dampened or enhanced by changes in local land surface parameters which depends on the location and the season (

Insights into Variations and Potential Long-Range Transport of Atmospheric Aerosols from the Aral Sea Basin in Central Asia

“…The potential long-range transport of the atmospheric aerosols from the dry lakebed of the Aral Sea over a period of 3 days could cover a large area as follows: the main impact would be felt in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan in the source region, the impact would extend to the Caucasus region, parts of China, Mongolia and Russia, and, especially, to the Tianshan Mountains, which is called the water tower and ecological barrier of central Asia, under the effect of the south Asian summer monsoon and the westerly jet. Increasing attention has been paid to the impact of the Aral Sea's environmental change on local and regional climates, human health, and mountain ecosystems [47,55,63]. Evidence suggests that dust and salt-dust can be transported from the Aral Sea to the Tianshan Mountains region [64,65].…”

Prospective analysis of spatial heterogeneity influence on the concordance of remote sensing drought indices: a case of semi-arid agrosystems in Morocco (Moulouya and Tensift watersheds)

“…Second, analyses of standardized Taylor diagrams have been used to complement bias analyses because they allow for graphical visualization of the spatial variability of indices relative to baseline data (Taylor 2001). Because of its synthetic representation in two-dimensional space of several statistical measurements simultaneously, the Taylor diagram is often preferred to compare the series of calculated or simulated data of several models concerning real observations (Samadianfard et al 2018;Sharma and Tare 2018;Bisht et al 2019;Malik et al 2019Malik et al , 2020He et al 2021). The representations of the Taylor diagrams user were produced in the Rstudio environment with R code available online.…”

Factors Limiting Radial Growth of Conifers on Their Semiarid Borders across Kazakhstan

“…We can assume that in Central Asia, the impact of human activity on the local and regional climate may prevail over global trends. One of the vivid examples of anthropogenic interference is the Aral Sea crisis due to widespread irrigation, which led to an increase in climate continentality (the seasonal magnitude of temperature) and shifts in the seasonal distribution and amount of precipitation in the surrounding area [ 22 , 31 ]. The consequences of long-term climate trends for the vegetation of this large region are also ambiguous [ 32 , 33 , 34 ].…”