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Effects of global irrigation on the near-surface climate

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Abstract

Irrigation delivers about 2,600 km3 of water to the land surface each year, or about 2% of annual precipitation over land. We investigated how this redistribution of water affects the global climate, focusing on its effects on near-surface temperatures. Using the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) coupled to the Community Land Model (CLM), we compared global simulations with and without irrigation. To approximate actual irrigation amounts and locations as closely as possible, we used national-level census data of agricultural water withdrawals, disaggregated with maps of croplands, areas equipped for irrigation, and climatic water deficits. We further investigated the sensitivity of our results to the timing and spatial extent of irrigation. We found that irrigation alters climate significantly in some regions, but has a negligible effect on global-average near-surface temperatures. Irrigation cooled the northern mid-latitudes; the central and southeast United States, portions of southeast China and portions of southern and southeast Asia cooled by ~0.5 K averaged over the year. Much of northern Canada, on the other hand, warmed by ~1 K. The cooling effect of irrigation seemed to be dominated by indirect effects like an increase in cloud cover, rather than by direct evaporative cooling. The regional effects of irrigation were as large as those seen in previous studies of land cover change, showing that changes in land management can be as important as changes in land cover in terms of their climatic effects. Our results were sensitive to the area of irrigation, but were insensitive to the details of irrigation timing and delivery.

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Acknowledgments

We thank NCAR’s Advanced Study Program for sponsoring the “Art of Climate Modeling” summer colloquium, where we began this work. Mark Decker was also involved in that initial stage of the project. Jon Foley, Chris Kucharik and Mutlu Ozdogan all provided many helpful suggestions throughout every stage of this project. WJS was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, BIC by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Global Change Postdoctoral Program, and NB by a Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies student fellowship and a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate and Global Change Program. The simulations were performed on NCAR supercomputers. NCAR is funded by the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1710 University Avenue, Madison, WI, 53726, USA

    William J. Sacks

  2. Ocean and Climate Physics, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, 61 Route 9W, P.O. Box 1000, Palisades, NY, 10964-8000, USA

    Benjamin I. Cook

  3. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY, 10025, USA

    Benjamin I. Cook

  4. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado-Boulder, 216 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80309-0216, USA

    Nikolaus Buenning

  5. Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3000, Boulder, CO, 80307, USA

    Samuel Levis

  6. Earth Tech, 3750 N·W. 87th Ave Suite 300, Miami, FL, 33178, USA

    Joseph H. Helkowski

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  1. William J. Sacks
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  2. Benjamin I. Cook
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Correspondence to William J. Sacks.

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Sacks, W.J., Cook, B.I., Buenning, N. et al. Effects of global irrigation on the near-surface climate. Clim Dyn 33, 159–175 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-008-0445-z

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