The Regional Climate Effects of Replacing Farmland and Re-greening the Desertification Lands with Forest or Grass in West China

The West Development Policy being implemented in China causes significant land use and land cover(LULC) changes in West China, of which the two most important types of LULC change are replacingfarmland and re-greening the desertification land with forest or grass. This paper modifies the prevailingregional climate model (RCM) by updating its lower boundary conditions with the up-to-date satellitedatabase of the Global Land Cover Characteristics Database (GLCCD) created by the United StatesGeological Survey and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The modified RCM is used to simulate thepossible regional climate changes due to the LULC variations. The preliminary results can be summarizedas that the two main types of LULC variation, replacing farmland and greening the desertification landswith forest or grass in west China, will affect the regional climate mostly in northwest and north China,where the surface temperature will decrease and the precipitation will increase. The regional climateadjustments in South, Southwest China and on the Tibet Plateau are uncertain.