Impacts of land use changes over southern South American climate: a modeling study using the MM5 regional model

Abstract

La Plata Basin (LPB) and the Argentinean Pampas are two of the most important agricultural regions in the world. In the last decades the areas devoted to agriculture over these regions have been extended at the expense of deforestation and replacement of natural pastures. Land use/land cover changes (hereafter LULCC) may modify the exchanges of energy and moisture between the land surface and the atmosphere due to the control that land surface exerts on the partitioning of available energy at the surface between sensible and latent heat fluxes and the available water between evaporation and runoff. Besides that, the surface heterogeneity not only determines the microclimate but also affects mesoscale atmospheric circulations (Hartmann, 1994; Weaver and Avissar, 2001; Yang, 2004; Sertel et al., 2010).