Impact of Historical Land Cover Changes on Land Surface Characteristics over the Indian Region Using Land Information System

The present study has employed a regional Land Surface Model (LSM) to investigate the impact of historical land cover changes on land surface characteristics over the Indian subcontinent for the period of 1930–2013. Four simulations that include a control run and three experiment runs are performed with the Noah 3.6 LSM within the Land Information System (LIS). In the present study, the Noah LSM is driven by meteorological forcings, with radiation data obtained from the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) and the rainfall data obtained from IMD gridded rainfall data. The control run is performed with a MODIS-IGBP land cover map, while the three experimental runs are performed with three different potential land cover maps for the years 1930, 1975, and 2013. The potential land cover maps for the above three simulations are developed by blending the MODIS-IGBP data set with the fractional forest cover data set; the latter data is available for the years 1930, 1975, and 2013. Results indicate that the historical land cover change (1930 to 2013) has reduced the annual mean of latent heat flux and net surface heat flux over the Indian domain by \(-\)24.74 \(W/m^2\) and \(-\)14.18 \(W/m^2\) respectively, while the sensible heat flux and the soil temperature has increased by 4.97 \(W/m^2\) and 2.78 K. The annual mean change in latent heat flux, sensible heat flux, and soil temperature demonstrate that the largest changes occur when the land cover changes from forest to urban land as compared to forest to cropland, forest to grassland and forest to open shrubland. The annual mean change in latent heat flux is moderately large for the land cover change from forest to open shrubland when compared to forest to grassland and forest to cropland. The above is attributed to the effects of evapotranspiration, which has high values for the cropland followed by grassland and open shrubland. Furthermore, the triple collocation method is employed to assess the impact of historical land cover change on soil moisture. Results indicate that the triple collocation method effectively demonstrates the impact of land cover change on soil moisture.