How land-cover change shapes regional climate : Insights from Belgium since 1900

The Belgian Climate Centre is organising a new seminar of the Climate Cookies & Coffee series:

How land-cover change shapes regional climate: Insights from Belgium since 1900 

Presenter: Diana Tzvetkov (IRM)

Abstract: Land-cover changes can drive strong regional temperature trends, either exacerbating or tempering the impacts of global climate change on public health, infrastructure, and ecosystems. These changes are generally not included in climate reconstructions, such that temperature shifts may solely be attributed to large-scale changes. Indeed, it remains challenging to include land-cover change effects in high-resolution climate reconstructions due to the scarcity of historical meteorological and physiographic data.

We address these challenges by proposing a novel approach for historical climate reconstruction, explicitly integrating urbanisation and forest-cover changes into gridded observational fields. The approach is demonstrated through the reconstruction of 1-km resolution monthly fields of near-surface daily minimum and maximum temperature starting in 1900 for Belgium, which saw pronounced changes…