Impacts of land cover change on simulating precipitation in Beijing area of China

Precise and reliable land cover data is of fundamental importance in a weather and climate model. Accurate representation of land surface properties directly affects the calculation precision of simulation through energy interactive between land surface and atmosphere. In this study, the impacts of urbanization on precipitation during a heavy rain process are investigated and analyzed in Beijing area of China. Five land use-land cover (LULC) data are compared and used to simulate the precipitation during the rainstorm. The results from the simulations in WRF model suggest that, land cover change has little impact on average temperature of land surface during rainfall event, but differences in the average hourly precipitation over urban area resulted from urbanization are simulated; urban expansion can increase the total precipitation over the area of urban.