Journal
JOURNAL OF CLIMATE
Volume 32, Issue 14, Pages 4445-4471Publisher
AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0772.1
Keywords
Atmosphere-land interaction
Categories
Funding
- National Key Research and Development Program of China [2017YFA0603803]
- Natural Science Foundation of China [41775075, 41475063]
- Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Climate Change
- Australian Research Council (ARC) via the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes [CE170100023]
- China Scholarship Council
- Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes [CE170100023]
- New South Wales Research Attraction and Acceleration Program
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China is several decades into large-scale afforestation programs to help address significant ecological and environmental degradation, with further afforestation planned for the future. However, the biophysical impact of afforestation on local surface temperature remains poorly understood, particularly in midlatitude regions where the importance of the radiative effect driven by albedo and the nonradiative effect driven by energy partitioning is uncertain. To examine this issue, we investigated the local impact of afforestation by comparing adjacent forest and open land pixels using satellite observations between 2001 and 2012. We attributed local surface temperature change between adjacent forest and open land to radiative and nonradiative effects over China based on the Intrinsic Biophysical Mechanism (IBM) method. Our results reveal that forest causes warming of 0.23 degrees C (+/- 0.21 degrees C) through the radiative effect and cooling of -0.74 degrees C (+/- 0.50 degrees C) through the nonradiative effect on local surface temperature compared with open land. The nonradiative effect explains about 79% (+/- 16%) of local surface temperature change between adjacent forest and open land. The contribution of the nonradiative effect varies with forest and open land types. The largest cooling is achieved by replacing grasslands or rain-fed croplands with evergreen tree types. Conversely, converting irrigated croplands to deciduous broadleaf forest leads to warming. This provides new guidance on afforestation strategies, including how these should be informed by local conditions to avoid amplifying climate-related warming.
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