Toggle navigation
52.38.26.42

reference : Empirical evidence for a recent slowdown in irrigation-induced cooling

JSON YAML text HTML Turtle N-Triples JSON Triples RDF+XML RDF+JSON Graphviz SVG
/reference/5fcceae3-3fd5-485c-83cc-ac2f844556c9
This bibliographic record appears in :
chapter
13
report
nca3

Reference URIs:
Publication/contributor :
article
Empirical evidence for a recent slowdown in irrigation-induced cooling
Bibliographic fields
reftype Journal Article
Abstract Understanding the influence of past land use changes on climate is needed to improve regional projections of future climate change and inform debates about the tradeoffs associated with land use decisions. The effects of rapid expansion of irrigated area in the 20th century has remained unclear relative to other land use changes, such as urbanization, that affected a similar total land area. Using spatial and temporal variations in temperature and irrigation extent observed in California, we show that irrigation expansion has had a large cooling effect on summertime average daily daytime temperatures (−0.14°C to −0.25°C per decade), which corresponds to an estimated cooling of −1.8°C to −3.2°C since the introduction of irrigation practices. Irrigation has negligible effects on nighttime temperatures, leading to a net cooling effect of irrigation on climate (−0.06°C to −0.19°C per decade). Stabilization of irrigated area has occurred in California since 1980 and is expected in the near future for many irrigated regions. The suppression of past human-induced greenhouse warming by increased irrigation is therefore likely to slow in the future, and a potential decrease in irrigation may even contribute to a more rapid warming. Changes in irrigation alone are not expected to influence broad-scale temperatures, but they may introduce large uncertainties in climate projections for irrigated agricultural regions, which provide ≈40% of global food production.
Author Bonfils, C. Lobell, D.
DOI 10.1073/pnas.0700144104
ISSN 0027-8424
Issue 34
Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Keywords climate; irrigation effect; observations
Pages 13582-13587
Title Empirical evidence for a recent slowdown in irrigation-induced cooling
Volume 104
Year 2007
Bibliographic identifiers
.reference_type 0
_chapter ["Ch. 13: Land Use and Land Cover Change FINAL"]
_record_number 629
_uuid 5fcceae3-3fd5-485c-83cc-ac2f844556c9