Land-Use and Land-Cover Changes

This book offers a comprehensive review of current knowledge on how natural and anthropogenic land-use and cover changes affect weather, air quality and climate worldwide, and explains how these changes might trigger further land-use and land cover changes.

Wildfires, changing glaciers, deforestation, open-pit mining, increasing demands for food and bio-fuel production and the growth of megacities change our landscape. The book comprehensively reviews the current knowledge on how natural and anthropogenic land-use/cover changes affect weather, air quality and climate worldwide and explains how these changes may trigger further land-use/cover changes. It discusses how anthropogenic land-use/cover changes have affected local and regional climate and air quality since the settlement of America and the industrialisation. It addresses the topic how long-range transport of pollutants and dust of devasted areas as well as teleconnections may cause changes far away from the areas where the land-use/cover changes occurred, for which land-use/cover change may become an international issue similar to CO2. It also discusses relations to global change and future societal and scientific challenges related to land-use/cover changes.

Discusses the impact of land-use/cover changes on the atmosphere, considering the water, energy and trace gas cycle Discusses the impact of land-use/cover changes on the atmosphere in various climate regions of the world including the polar regions Explores climate and air quality impacts of land-use/cover changes in relation to global change

Autorentext

Nicole Mölders earned her PhD at the University of Cologne in 1992 and her habilitation at the University of Leipzig in 1999. She uses mesoscale and climate models to investigate human and natural impacts on weather, air quality and climate with special focus on the Arctic. From 1999-2001, she was honored as a Heisenberg Fellow for Physical Hydrology, a prestigious award conferred by the DFG (German Research Foundation). After her time at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), she joined the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). She has taught meteorology including cloud physics and satellite meteorology, numerical modeling and parameterization methods, mesoscale dynamics, and introduction to computational meteorology. She is Editor-in-Chief of Climate and on the advisory board for Springer Briefs in Climatic Studies. Gerhard Kramm earned his PhD in meteorology at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1994. At UAF, his research activities are mainly focused on the theoretical aspects of meteorology, in particular, micro-meteorology (including turbulence and its impact upon chemical processes), dynamics, radiation, and climate change. Since 2005, he has served on the editorial board of the Journal of the Calcutta Mathematical Society. He has taught atmospheric dynamics, atmospheric radiation, physics of the atmospheric boundary layer, and turbulence. In 2007, he was the lead instructor of the Science Teacher Education Program on Global Climate Change. He joined the Editorial Board of the Datasets Papers in Geosciences (Atmospheric Sciences) in 2012.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Physical and chemical principles.- 3. Impact of land-cover and land-cover changes.- 4. Future challenges.- 5. Conclusions.- Appendix: List of abbreviations.- Index.