全球变化知识资源中心

The impacts of land use/land cover (LULC) conditions on the global water and energy budgets are essential to understanding climate intensification in the 21st century. This study evaluated latent heat flux (LE), sensible heat flux (H), and runoff in four climate regions (temperate, continental, arid, and tropical) in East Asia from 2001 to 2015. Two community land model (CLM) experiments were performed using default LULC data (CLM 4.0) and newly created Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) based LULC data from 2010 (CLM 2010) to assess the impact of LULC changes on climate. Anthropogenic LULC changes have considerable impacts on the climate and its extremes. For the whole East Asia region, area-averaged runoff decreased by 2.10%. The temperate region experienced a 3.16% decrease in runoff and a 422% increase in LE due to an increase in irrigation activities that could lead to the drying of soil moisture and drought in the future. In contrast, the arid region experienced a 630% increase in runoff despite dry conditions and a 5.70% reduction in LE, which ultimately increased H by 2.25% and caused an intensification of the climate in the form of strong heat waves and floods. The continental region followed the same trend as the temperate region with a noticeable decrease in winter H, which caused severe cold weather. The tropical region showed a slight impact of LULC change on energy fluxes due to high precipitation and intense solar radiations. Overall, the results of this research follow the 'dry gets drier and wet gets wetter' paradigm due to LULC changes in the study region. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.