A Study on Changes in Local Meteorological Fields due to a Change in Land Use in the Lake Shihwa Region Using Synthetic Land Cover Data and High-Resolution Mesoscale Model

In this study, the influence of a change in land use on the local weather fields is investigated around the Lake Shihwa area using synthetic land cover data and a high-resolution mesoscale model -the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF). The default land cover data generally used in the WRF is based on the land use category of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), which erroneously presents most land areas of the Korean Peninsula as savannas. To revise such a fault, a multi-temporal land cover data, provided by the Ministry of Environment of Korea, was employed to generate a land cover map of 2005 subject to the land use in Korea at that time. A new land cover map of 1989, before the construction of the Lake Shihwa, was made based on the 2005 map and the Landsat 4-5 TM satellite images of two years. Over the areas where the land use had been changed (e.g., from sea to wetlands, towns, etc.) due to the Lake Shihwa development project, the skin temperature decreased by up to 8 degrees C in the winter case while increased by as much as 14 degrees C in the summer case. Changes in the water vapor mixing ratio were mostly affected by advection and topography in both seasons, with considerable increase in the summer case due to continuous sea breeze. Local decrease in water vapor occurred over high land use change areas and/ or over downstream of such areas where alteration in wind fields were induced by changes in skin temperature and surface roughness at the areas of land use changes. The albedo increased by about 0.1% in the regions where sea was converted into wetland. In the regions where urban areas were developed, such as Songdo New Town and Incheon International Airport, the albedo increased by up to 0.16%.