Effects of Great Plains Irrigation on Regional Climate
Issue Date
2011-08-31Author
Huber, David B.
Publisher
University of Kansas
Format
68 pages
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
M.S.
Discipline
Geography
Rights
This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
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Show full item recordAbstract
Irrigation provides a much needed source of water in regions of low precipitation such as the western Great Plains. However, adding water to a region that would otherwise see little natural precipitation has ramifications for the partitioning of radiative and turbulent fluxes, the development of the planetary boundary layer, and the transport of water vapor from the regions of irrigation. The first two effects have the potential to drastically alter the climate of irrigated regions of the Great Plains, while the transport mechanism can alter precipitation processes of regions far downstream of the irrigated areas. These effects are investigated in this thesis through the employment of the Advanced Research (ARW) implementation of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) version 3.1.1 using a pair of simulations representing an irrigated and non-irrigated Great Plains. It will be shown that the introduction of irrigation in the Great Plains alters the radiation budget by increasing latent heat flux and cooling the surface temperatures. These effects, in turn, provide additional moisture to the atmosphere and increases the net radiation at the surface, thus increasing moist static energy in the boundary layer and providing downstream convective systems with additional energy and moisture. The increase in atmospheric moisture nearly doubles precipitation accumulations downstream without producing any new precipitation events.
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