The impacts of land use and land cover change on biophysical processes in West Africa using a regional climate model experimental approach

Abstract

Using 2001 and 2016 land use (LU) data and three developed deforestation LU scenarios, namely Deforest I, II and III, the possible impacts of the ongoing land use land cover change (LULCC) over West Africa (WA) and the uncertainty regarding the impacts on regional climate were assessed. Twelve Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model simulations were configured with the default and integrated MODIS satellite dataset for two sets of 3 months (December-February DJF 2011-2012 and July-September JAS 2012) over WA. Between 2001 and 2016, changes that occurred in precipitation, tempera-ture and dew point temperature due to LULCC are mostly not significant at the 95% level with a decrease of 0.8, 0.0 and 0.1%, respectively. Deforest I, II and III caused significant changes with an increase of 44.4, 44.7, 41.5%; 0.8, 0.9, 1.1%; and 0.3, 0.1, −0.2%, respectively, for precipitation, temperature and dew point temperature. Precipitation was lower in the simulation with 2016

Afforestation in West Africa: potential benefits and trade-offs on regional climate extremes

“…Studies using coupled atmospheric-hydrological models, such as the WRF-Hydro model, have shown that incorporating surface and subsurface lateral water flow enhances runoff simulation and modifies the atmospheric water cycle, generally leading to increased evapotranspiration and precipitation (e.g., Arnault et al, 2021Arnault et al, , 2023Fersch et al, 2020;Furnari et al, 2022;Rummler et al, 2019). However, this local positive feedback is not supported by observational data (Duveiller et al, 2018b(Duveiller et al, , 2020Spracklen et al, 2018) and is often neglected in LULCC-based modeling studies (Abiodun et al, 2013;Achugbu et al, 2023;Camara et al, 2022;Diba et al, 2018;Ingrosso & Pausata, 2024;Smiatek & Kunstmann, 2023;Sy et al, 2017;Sy & Quesada, 2020).…”