HR: 0800h
AN: B41A-0153    [Abstracts]
TI: Global and Regional Surface Albedo Changes due to Land Use Transformation: an Anthropogenic Source for Climate Change
AU: * Monier, E
EM: emonier@ucdavis.edu
AF: University of California, Atmospheric Science Program, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616 United States
AU: Wharton, S
EM: swharton@ucdavis.edu
AF: University of California, Atmospheric Science Program, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616 United States
AU: Laabs, B
EM: bslaabs@ucdavis.edu
AF: University of California, Atmospheric Science Program, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616 United States
AU: Reck, R
EM: rareck@ucdavis.edu
AF: University of California, Atmospheric Science Program, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616 United States
AB: For the past decades, cropland area has been slowly increasing while forests and woodlands diminished, leading to consequent changes in land use resulting from human behavior. Besides, desertification directly affects millions of people around the world and not a single year goes by without new reports of ice melting. More than being an economic issue, land use transformation can prove to have altered the energy balance, and therefore the climate, through surface albedo changes over the past decades. Each land category has its own surface albedo, defined as its solar back scatter and being only a function of the radiation field incident on it and the properties of the land category itself. Using a global surface albedo model (Hummel and Reck, 1979), involving 49 different types of surfaces for each quarter of the year, January-March, April-June, July-September and October-December, surface albedo maps are computed from land usage maps for the 1970s and 1990s. Regional changes in the surface albedo can cause variation in the energy budget of the earth-atmosphere system, specifically in the tropospheric distribution of temperature, and therefore can be an anthropogenic source for climate change at a global scale. Many feedbacks and teleconnections can be found between surface albedo, cloud coverage and CO2 fluxes leading to a potentially unstable energy budget system. In order to fully comprehend climate change, a extensive review on that system and its foundations is expected to be released in 2006.
DE: 0315 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions (0426, 1610)
DE: 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions (1218, 1843, 3322)
DE: 1632 Land cover change
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005