Land management has been considered as a key strategy for climate change mitigation. Changes in land cover can affect local climate by altering water balance and energy flux. The climate response to deforestation depends on climate regime, season and background climate. Due to the climatic and topographic heterogeneity in Europe, few studies applied regional climate model to study the effect of deforestation on regional climate across the whole Europe. In this study, we use the regional climate model (RegCM) version 4.6.1 to quantify the effect of deforestation on regional climate. We perform two deforestation experiments (50% forest to grass and 100% forest to grass) and one control experiment for the period 1986-2015. We find that:

(1) deforestation produces a local warming e...[ Read more ]

Land management has been considered as a key strategy for climate change mitigation. Changes in land cover can affect local climate by altering water balance and energy flux. The climate response to deforestation depends on climate regime, season and background climate. Due to the climatic and topographic heterogeneity in Europe, few studies applied regional climate model to study the effect of deforestation on regional climate across the whole Europe. In this study, we use the regional climate model (RegCM) version 4.6.1 to quantify the effect of deforestation on regional climate. We perform two deforestation experiments (50% forest to grass and 100% forest to grass) and one control experiment for the period 1986-2015. We find that:

(1) deforestation produces a local warming effect in southern Europe, a cooling effect in northern Europe, and a nonlocal cooling effect over whole Europe;

(2) the nonlocal cooling effect not included in observation data is the main reason for conflicting results between model and observations;

(3) local effect is determined by balance of changes in radiation and changes in turbulent heat, nonlocal effect is caused by the cool air from nearby regions and the change of incoming radiation due to cloud changes;

(4) deforestation decrease precipitation, mainly in northern Europe in spring, which is mainly caused by evapotranspiration changes;

(5) deforestation increases the frequency of hot temperature extremes and reduces the frequency of cold temperature extremes.

In light of increasing extreme climate condition, implication of our results could be useful for a better understanding of biophysical land-climate interactions and informing local land use management policies adapting to climate change.

Keywords: RegCM4, Deforestation, Temperature, Precipitation, Europe, Extreme Climate, Land use change