Dataset Information

The Sensitivity of Land-Atmosphere Coupling to Modern Agriculture in the Northern Midlatitudes.

ABSTRACT: Modern agricultural land cover and management are important as regional climate forcings. Previous work has shown that land cover change can significantly impact key climate variables, including turbulent fluxes, precipitation, and surface temperature. However, fewer studies have investigated how intensive crop management can impact background climate conditions, such as the strength of land-atmosphere coupling and evaporative regime. We conduct sensitivity experiments using a state-of-the-art climate model with modified vegetation characteristics to represent modern crop cover and management, using observed crop-specific leaf area indexes and calendars. We quantify changes in land-atmosphere interactions and climate over intensively cultivated regions situated at transitions between moisture- and energy-limited conditions. Results show that modern intensive agriculture has significant and geographically varying impacts on regional evaporative regimes and background climate conditions. Over the northern Great Plains, modern crop intensity increases the model simulated precipitation and soil moisture, weakening hydrologic coupling by increasing surface water availability and reducing moisture limits on evapotranspiration. In the U.S. Midwest, higher growing season evapotranspiration, coupled with winter and spring rainfall declines, reduces regional soil moisture, while crop albedo changes also reduce net surface radiation. This results overall in reduced dependency of regional surface temperature on latent heat fluxes. In central Asia, a combination of reduced net surface energy and enhanced pre-growing season precipitation amplify the energy-limited evaporative regime. These results highlight the need for improved representations of agriculture in global climate models to better account for regional climate impacts and interactions with other anthropogenic forcings.

SUBMITTER: MCDermid SS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7375324 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Sensitivity of Land-Atmosphere Coupling to Modern Agriculture in the Northern Midlatitudes.

MCDermid Sonali Shukla SS Montes Carlo C Cook Benjamin I BI Puma Michael J MJ Kiang Nancy Y NY Aleinov Igor I

Journal of climate 20181226 2

Modern agricultural land cover and management are important as regional climate forcings. Previous work has shown that land cover change can significantly impact key climate variables, including turbulent fluxes, precipitation, and surface temperature. However, fewer studies have investigated how intensive crop management can impact background climate conditions, such as the strength of land-atmosphere coupling and evaporative regime. We conduct sensitivity experiments using a state-of-the-art c ...[more]

PMID: 32699488

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Project description:We present a regional-scale integrated modeling system (IMS) that includes Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC), Weather Research and Forecast (WRF), Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ), and Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) models. The centerpiece of the IMS is the Fertilizer Emission Scenario Tool for CMAQ (FEST-C), which includes a Java-based interface and EPIC adapted to regional applications along with built-in database and tools. The SWAT integration capability is a key enhanced feature in the current release of FEST-C v1.4. For integrated modeling demonstration and evaluation, FEST-C EPIC is simulated over three individual years with WRF/CMAQ weather and N deposition. Simulated yearly changes in water and N budgets along with yields for two major crops (corn grain and soybean) match those inferred from intuitive physical reasoning and survey data given different-year weather conditions. Yearlong air quality simulations with an improved bidirectional ammonia flux modeling approach directly using EPIC-simulated soil properties including NH3 content helps reduce biases of simulated gas-phase NH3 and NH4 + wet deposition over the growing season. Integrated hydrology and water quality simulations applied to the Mississippi River Basin show that estimated monthly streamflow and dissolved N near the outlet to the Gulf of Mexico display similar seasonal patterns as observed. Limitations and issues in different parts of the integrated multimedia simulations are identified and discussed to target areas for future improvements.Plain language summaryComputer modeling tools with land-water-air processes are important for understanding nutrient cycling and its negative impacts on air and water quality. We have developed an integrated modeling system that includes agriculture, atmosphere, and hydrology components. The centerpiece of the system is a computer system that includes an agricultural ecosystem model and tools used to connect different modeling components. The agricultural system can conduct simulations for 42 types of grassland and cropland with the influence of site, soil, and management information along with weather and nitrogen deposition from the atmosphere component. An air quality computer model then uses information from the agricultural model, such as how much ammonia is in the soil, to predict how much ammonia gets in the air. Then, the watershed hydrology and water quality model uses the information from the agricultural and atmospheric models to understand the influence of agriculture and atmosphere on water quality. The paper demonstrates and evaluates the integrated modeling system on issues mainly related to N cycling. The system performs reasonably well in comparison with survey and observation data given the configured modeling constraints. The paper also identifies and discusses the advantages and limitations in each part of the system for future applications and improvements.

Dataset Information

The Sensitivity of Land-Atmosphere Coupling to Modern Agriculture in the Northern Midlatitudes.

Publications

The Sensitivity of Land-Atmosphere Coupling to Modern Agriculture in the Northern Midlatitudes.

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