Potential and Actual impacts of deforestation and afforestation on land surface temperature

Abstract

Forests are undergoing significant changes throughout the globe. These changes can modify water, energy, and carbon balance of the land surface, which can ultimately affect climate. We utilize satellite data to quantify the potential and actual impacts of forest change on land surface temperature (LST) from 2003 to 2013. The potential effect of forest change on temperature is calculated by the LST difference between forest and nearby nonforest land, whereas the actual impact on temperature is quantified by the LST trend difference between deforested (afforested) and nearby unchanged forest (nonforest land) over several years. The good agreement found between potential and actual impacts both at annual and seasonal levels indicates that forest change can have detectable impacts on surface temperature trends. That impact, however, is different for maximum and minimum temperatures. Overall, deforestation caused a significant warming up to 0.28 K/decade on average temperature trends in tropical regions, a cooling up to −0.55 K/decade in boreal regions, a weak impact in the northern temperate regions, and strong warming (up to 0.32 K/decade) in the southern temperate regions. Afforestation induced an opposite impact on temperature trends. The magnitude of the estimated temperature impacts depends on both the threshold and the data set (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer and Landsat) by which forest cover change is defined. Such a latitudinal pattern in temperature impact is mainly caused by the competing effects of albedo and evapotranspiration on temperature. The methodology developed here can be used to evaluate the temperature change induced by forest cover change around the globe.

Biophysics and vegetation cover change: a process-based evaluation framework for confronting land surface models with satellite observations

“…Zhao and Jackson 2014;Li et al 2015;Peng et al 2014;Duveiller et al, 2018b). Both appear to yield similar results (Li et al, 2016), but the space-for-time approach allows Earth Syst. Sci.…”

Local Effects of Forests on Temperatures across Europe

“…The increase in soil moisture for forests tends to increase the surface heat capacity, which results in increases in daytime heat storage and nighttime heating. In addition, due to the higher ET from forests relative to open land, the increases in air humidity and boundary layer clouds increase the downward longwave radiation from the atmosphere and decrease the upward longwave radiation from the surface, which increases surface temperatures at night [9,15,17].…”

“…There are two kinds of observations, that are widely used to explore the effects of forests on temperature: satellite and in-situ data [7,14,[17][18][19][20]. Some studies used satellite observations found that afforestation in China cooled daytime temperatures and warmed the nocturnal temperatures [18,20].…”

“…However, few studies have used observations to examine the effects of forests on climate in Europe, which has experienced a large increase in forests over the last two decades. Although Li et al [14,17] used satellite observation to explore the effect of forest globally and found that forests decrease local temperatures in Europe, they focused on spatial patterns and did not consider the effects of background climate on forests during different yeas. Additionally, using two time observations to represent daily averages may also lead to some uncertainties [33].…”

Inconsistent Responses of Hot Extremes to Historical Land Use and Cover Change Among the Selected CMIP5 Models

“…Although the estimated RF induced by LUCC is far less than those of other anthropogenic forcings (e.g., well‐mixed greenhouse gases) at a global scale, the climatic impacts of LUCC at local to regional scales can be comparable to or even larger than the impacts from these forcing agents (Chase et al, ; Gao et al, ; Lee et al, ; Lohila et al, ; Pitman & Zhao, ; Zhao & Pitman, ). A number of observational and modeling studies have demonstrated that the historical LUCC (i.e., deforestation) could generally yield to a cooling effect on the mean temperature in high‐latitude regions but a warming effect in tropical regions (e.g., Bala et al, ; Betts, ; Claussen et al, ; Devaraju et al, ; Lee et al, ; Y. Li et al, , ; Zhang et al, ). However, uncertainties (e.g., disagreements in magnitude and sign) in the LUCC‐induced mean temperature changes still remain in multimodel results.…”