Mitigating heat waves through changes in agricultural practices
Abstract
Cropland management practices aiming at reducing or suppressing tillage (no-till) in order to retain crop residues on the soil surface may have a potential to sequester carbon in soils and are therefore considered a possible option to mitigate climate change. On the other hand, no-till systems may also modify physical properties like surface albedo thereby affecting land-atmosphere exchanges, but such biogeophysical effects have yet to be investigated. Here, we investigate the biogeophysical effect of no-till agriculture over Europe using a regional climate model. A no-till scenario where surface albedo is increased over croplands based on values from in-situ measurements is considered. The cooling effect owing to albedo increase under no-till farming appears to be strongly amplified during warm events. This is due to the low cloud cover during these events, thus leading to a more efficient radiative cooling from albedo change. This suggests that no-till farming could be used as a way to mitigate heat wave impacts. No-till farming also has an impact on temperature through changes in evaporation, but we find that this effect is not the dominating factor during heat wave days. Overall, the cooling effect reached during heat wave days is of the order of 2 degrees.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMGC43A1042D
- Keywords:
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- 3322 ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES Land/atmosphere interactions