Afforestation in China cools local land surface temperature

By S. Peng, Shilong Piao, Zhenzhong Zeng, Philippe Ciais, Liming Zhou, Laurent Z. X. Li, Ranga B. Myneni, Yizhou Yin, Hui Zeng. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014

684 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance China has the largest afforested area in the world. Afforestation not only contributes to increased carbon storage but also alters local albedo and turbulent energy fluxes, which offers feedback on the local and regional climate. This study presents previously unidentified observational evidence of the effect of large-scale afforestation on land surface temperature (LST) in China. Afforestation decreases daytime LST, because of enhanced evapotranspiration, and increases nighttime LST. This nighttime warming tends to offset daytime cooling in dry regions. These results suggest it is necessary to carefully consider where to plant trees to achieve potential climatic benefits in future afforestation projects. China has the largest afforested area in the world (∼62 million hectares in 2008), and these forests are carbon sinks. The climatic effect of these new forests depends on how radiant and turbulent energy fluxes over these plantations modify surface temperature. For instance, a lower albedo may cause warming, which negates the climatic benefits of carbon sequestration. Here, we used satellite measurements of land surface temperature (LST) from planted forests and adjacent grasslands or croplands in China to understand how afforestation affects LST. Afforestation is found to decrease daytime LST by about 1.1 ± 0.5 °C (mean ± 1 SD) and to increase nighttime LST by about 0.2 ± 0.5 °C, on average. The observed daytime cooling is a result of increased evapotranspiration. The nighttime warming is found to increase with latitude and decrease with average rainfall. Afforestation in dry regions therefore leads to net warming, as daytime cooling is offset by nighttime warming. Thus, it is necessary to carefully consider where to plant trees to realize potential climatic benefits in future afforestation projects.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/360eac56ba22924100d5b9cb507a93b87a7c2bf8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Effects of climate extremes on the terrestrial carbon cycle: concepts, processes and potential future impacts (2015, background): “In addition, extreme drought will often reduce evapotranspiration and its cooling effect and thereby causes a positive local feedback on warming (e.g. Seneviratne et al., 2010; Teuling et al., 2010; Mueller & Seneviratne, 2012; Peng et al., 2014).”
Detection and attribution of vegetation greening trend in China over the last 30 years (2015, background): “, 2013) and can affect the climate system through a number of bio-physical processes (Friedlingstein et al., 2006; Lee et al., 2011; Peng et al., 2014).”