Analysis of the Effects of Different Land Use and Land Cover Classification on Surface Meteorological Variables using WRF Model

The continuous population growth and the subsequent economic expansion over centuries have been the primary drivers of land use /land cover (LULC) changes resulting in the environmental changes across the globe. Most of the urban areas being developed today are on the expense of agricultural or barren lands and the changes result from various practices such as deforestation, changing agriculture practices, rapid expansion of urban centers etc Updated land cover and land use data derived from satellites offer the possibility of consistent and regularly collected information on LULC. In the present study the land use / land cover (LULC) changes over NCR is examined by supervised classification technique using images obtained from Landsat missions for five years 1972,1981,1993,2003 and 2014, representative of five decades. It is seen that the study region had just 126 sq km of urban built up in 1972 which has increased to 2180 sq km in 2014 depicting almost 17 fold increase in the urban area. The water bodies show a decline of almost 40% in their coverage while Sariska National Park shows a decrease of 76 % in forest cover. Further, LULC of these five decades are taken as different input cases in WRF Model and the effect of these changes on surface temperature (T2m), Land Surface Temperature (LST), Sensible Heat Flux (SHFX) and Latent Heat flux (LH) is analyzed.