文章基本信息

标题：Response of surface air temperature to small-scale land clearing across latitudes
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作者：Mi Zhang ; Xuhui Lee ; Guirui Yu 等
期刊名称：Environmental Research Letters
印刷版ISSN：1748-9326
电子版ISSN：1748-9326
出版年度：2014
卷号：9
期号：3
页码：034002
DOI：10.1088/1748-9326/9/3/034002
语种：English
出版社：IOP Publishing Ltd
摘要：Climate models simulating continental scale deforestation suggest a warming effect of land clearing on the surface air temperature in the tropical zone and a cooling effect in the boreal zone due to different control of biogeochemical and biophysical processes. Ongoing land-use/cover changes mostly occur at local scales (hectares), and it is not clear whether the local-scale deforestation will generate temperature patterns consistent with the climate model results. Here we paired 40 and 12 flux sites with nearby weather stations in North and South America and in Eastern Asia, respectively, and quantified the temperature difference between these paired sites. Our goal was to investigate the response of the surface air temperature to local-scale (hectares) land clearing across latitudes using the surface weather stations as proxies for localized land clearing. The results show that north of 10°N, the annual mean temperature difference (open land minus forest) decreases with increasing latitude, but the temperature difference shrinks with latitude at a faster rate in the Americas [−0.079 (±0.010) °C per degree] than in Asia [−0.046 (±0.011) °C per degree]. Regression of the combined data suggests a transitional latitude of about 35.5°N that demarks deforestation warming to the south and cooling to the north. The warming in latitudes south of 35°N is associated with increase in the daily maximum temperature, with little change in the daily minimum temperature while the reverse is true in the boreal latitudes.