Principal Investigator Timothy Cronin
The human footprint on the global land surface is large, and rapidly changing, and changes in land surface properties can affect the climate. But real land surfaces are highly complex and heterogeneous, and thus difficult to represent in climate models. The complexity of the land surface formulations used in climate models often makes it difficult to understand what is going on when we attempt to simulate something like the impacts of land cover change on climate. I have developed a (relatively) simple theory which can be used to qualitatively understand how changes in surface wetness, roughness, and reflectivity of the land surface lead to changes in near-surface climate.