Crop Albedo Research Articles

Albedo of crops as a nature-based climate solution to global warming

Abstract Surface albedo can affect the energy budget and subsequently cause localized warming or cooling of the climate. When we convert a substantial portion of lands to agriculture, land surface properties are consequently altered, including albedo. Through crop selection and management, one can increase crop albedo to obtain higher levels of localized cooling effects to mitigate global warming. Still, there is little understanding about how distinctive features of a cropping system may be responsible for elevated albedo and consequently for the cooling potential of cultivated lands. To address this pressing issue, we conducted seasonal measurements of surface reflectivity during five growing seasons on annual crops of corn-soybean–winter wheat (Zea mays L.- Glycine max L. Merrill—Triticum aestivum L.; CSW) rotations at three agronomic intensities, a monoculture of perennial switchgrass, and perennial polycultures of early successional and restored prairie grasslands. We found that crop-species, agronomic intensity, seasonality, and plant phenology had significant effects on albedo. The mean ± SD of albedo was highest in perennial crops of switchgrass (Panicum virgatum; 0.179 ± 0.04), intermediate in early successional crops (0.170 ± 0.04), and lowest in a reduced input corn systems with cover crops (0.154 ± 0.02). The strongest cooling potentials were found in soybean (−0.450 kg CO2e m−2 yr−1) and switchgrass (−0.367 kg CO2e m−2 yr−1), with up to −0.265 kg CO2e m−2 yr−1 of localized climate cooling annually provided by different agroecosystems. We also demonstrated how diverse ecosystems, leaf canopy, and agronomic practices can affect surface reflectivity and provide another potential nature-based solution for reducing global warming at localized scales.

About the Assessment of Cover Crop Albedo Potential Cooling Effect: Risk of the Darkening Feedback Loop Effects

Today societies face an unprecedented challenge to limit global warming and restore agricultural soils. Recent studies show that the introduction of cover crops over Europe could result in a cooling impact due to an increase in soil organic carbon stocks, a decrease in the use of fertilizers, and an increase in surface albedo of the croplands. Based on the use of remote sensing data, land cover database, meteorological data, national agricultural statistics, and ground measurements, a generic model was developed to simulate the radiative forcing following the change in surface albedo. This article analyzes the impact of the introduction of cover crops in Europe during the fallow periods. Compared to previous studies, this work discusses: (i) The maximum greening potential in Europe and the associated indirect surface properties changes (ii) for snowfall episodes, and (iii) due to an increase in organic matter. This study shows that the mitigation potential of cover crops through albedo effects could reach 6.74 MtCO2-eq.yr−1 by extending the periods of the introduction of the cover crops to all possible fallow periods. This mitigation could be limited to 5.68 MtCO2-eq.yr−1 if the impact of snowfalls is considered. This would be equivalent to 9.12 gCO2.m−2.yr−1. Finally, this study investigates the feedback loop due to soil darkening with soil organic carbon content increase when cover crops are introduced, considering two scenarios. The first considers the soil organic carbon content increase following repeated incorporation of cover crop biomass into the soil, simulated with the DayCent model. The second, more conceptual and extreme scenario aims at alerting on the possible impact of a combination of carbon farming practices, such as biochar or organic amendments. Our results show that this effect could lead to a loss of 20% of the climate benefit (i.e., 5.39 MtCO2-eq.yr−1). In conclusion, this study shows that cover crops have a strong potential for climate mitigation through direct albedo effects (soil coverage). However, once introduced, cropland should be permanently covered by vegetation or straws in order to avoid this darkening feedback loop effect.

Assessing the potential for crop albedo enhancement in reducing heatwave frequency, duration, and intensity under future climate change

Adapting to the impacts of future warming, and in particular the impacts of heatwaves, is an increasingly important challenge. One proposed strategy is land-surface radiation management via crop albedo enhancement. This has been argued to be an effective method of reducing daily hot temperature extremes regionally. However, the influence of crop albedo enhancement on heatwave events, which last three or more days, is yet to be explored and this remains an important knowledge gap. Using a fully coupled earth system model with 10 ensemble members, we show that crop albedo enhancement by up to ＋0.1 reduces the frequency of heatwave days over Europe and North America by 10 to 20 days; with a larger reduction over Europe under a future climate driven by SSP2-4.5. The average temperature anomaly during heatwaves (the magnitude of the event), is reduced by 0.8 °C to 1.2 °C where the albedo was enhanced, but reductions in mean heatwave duration are limited. There was a marked reduction in the mean annual cumulative heatwave intensity across most of Eurasia and North America, ranging from 32 °C to as high as 80 °C in parts of southern Europe. These changes were largely driven by a reduction in net radiation, decreasing the sensible heat flux, which reduces the maximum temperature, and therefore, heatwave frequency and intensity. These changes were largely localised to where the albedo enhancement was applied with no significant changes in atmospheric circulation or precipitation, which presents advantages for implementation. While our albedo perturbation of up to ＋0.1 is large and represents the likely upper limit of what is possible with more reflective crops, and we assume that more reflective crops are grown everywhere and instantly, these results provide useful guidance to policy makers and farmers on the maximum possible benefits of using more reflective crops in limiting the impacts of heatwaves under future climate.

Retrieving Crop Albedo Based on Radar Sentinel-1 and Random Forest Approach

Monitoring agricultural crops is of paramount importance for preserving water resources and increasing water efficiency over semi-arid areas. This can be achieved by modelling the water resources all along the growing season through the coupled water–surface energy balance. Surface albedo is a key land surface variable to constrain the surface radiation budget and hence the coupled water–surface energy balance. In order to capture the hydric status changes over the growing season, optical remote sensing becomes impractical due to cloud cover in some periods, especially over irrigated winter crops in semi-arid regions. To fill the gap, this paper aims to generate cloudless surface albedo product from Sentinel-1 data that offers a source of high spatio-temporal resolution images. This can help to better capture the vegetation development along the growth season through the surface radiation budget. Random Forest (RF) algorithm was implemented using Sentinel-1 backscatters as input. The approach was tested over an irrigated semi-arid zone in Morocco, which is known by its heterogeneity in term of soil conditions and crop types. The obtained results are evaluated against Landsat-derived albedo with quasi-concurrent Landsat/Sentinel-1 overpasses (up to one day offset), while a further validation was investigated using in situ field scale albedo data. The best model-hyperparameters selection was dependent on two validation approaches (K-fold cross-validation ‘k = 10’, and holdout). The more robust and accurate model parameters are those that represent the best statistical metrics (root mean square error ‘RMSE’, bias and correlation coefficient ‘R’). Coefficient values ranging from 0.70 to 0.79 and a RMSE value between 0.0002 and 0.00048 were obtained comparing Landsat and predicted albedo by RF method. The relative error ratio equals 4.5, which is acceptable to predict surface albedo.

Could crop albedo modification reduce regional warming over Australia?

Climate observations and projections for Australia show an increase in warm temperature extremes, including the frequency, duration and intensity of heatwaves. Recent global scale studies have suggested that agricultural land-use management options, such as increasing crop albedo, could reducing local warming. Australia has approximately 3,727,210 km2 of cropland agricultural land-use, the majority of which is in southwest Western Australia and southeast Australia. This presents a potential opportunity to reduce regional warming via crop albedo enhancement. We use a regional climate model at 10 km resolution, to show that crop albedo enhancement of up to 0.1 could reduce monthly mean daily maximum temperatures by −1.0 °C to −1.2 °C, and monthly highest maximum temperatures by up to −1.4 °C to −1.6 °C during the cropping season. This cooling is approximately 3 times higher over Australia than global climate models predict. We highlight stronger cooling over southwest Western Australia as compared to southeast Australia, the opposite to global model studies which poorly resolve southwestern agricultural regions. The regional cooling was driven by a reduction in surface net shortwave radiation leading to a decrease in both sensible and latent heat flux of up to 50 W m−2 and 20 W m−2 respectively, when albedo is increased by up to 0.1. There were no cloud feedbacks or effects on precipitation. Our results highlight the importance of using regional climate models at a sufficiently high spatial resolution when investigating agricultural land-use management to reduce regional warming.

The Sensitivity of Land-Atmosphere Coupling to Modern Agriculture in the Northern Midlatitudes.

Modern agricultural land cover and management are important as regional climate forcings. Previous work has shown that land cover change can significantly impact key climate variables, including turbulent fluxes, precipitation, and surface temperature. However, fewer studies have investigated how intensive crop management can impact background climate conditions, such as the strength of land-atmosphere coupling and evaporative regime. We conduct sensitivity experiments using a state-of-the-art climate model with modified vegetation characteristics to represent modern crop cover and management, using observed crop-specific leaf area indexes and calendars. We quantify changes in land-atmosphere interactions and climate over intensively cultivated regions situated at transitions between moisture- and energy-limited conditions. Results show that modern intensive agriculture has significant and geographically varying impacts on regional evaporative regimes and background climate conditions. Over the northern Great Plains, modern crop intensity increases the model simulated precipitation and soil moisture, weakening hydrologic coupling by increasing surface water availability and reducing moisture limits on evapotranspiration. In the U.S. Midwest, higher growing season evapotranspiration, coupled with winter and spring rainfall declines, reduces regional soil moisture, while crop albedo changes also reduce net surface radiation. This results overall in reduced dependency of regional surface temperature on latent heat fluxes. In central Asia, a combination of reduced net surface energy and enhanced pre-growing season precipitation amplify the energy-limited evaporative regime. These results highlight the need for improved representations of agriculture in global climate models to better account for regional climate impacts and interactions with other anthropogenic forcings.

EVALUATION OF CROP ALBEDO OF DIFFERENT SUNFLOWER CROP ROTATION CULTIVARS AND ITS EFFECT ON LATENT HEAT FLUX

Surface albedo is expressed as the fraction of incoming shortwave solar radiation reflected by the surface. Surface albedo is one of the primary factors influencing regional and global climates as well as ecological and biophysical processes especially in the study of water and energy fluxes of ecosystems. In these research areas, accurate determination of net radiation plays a vital role for determination of the fluxes. In this study, it is aimed to establish the crop albedo values of three sunflower cultivars in the northwestern part of Turkey where sunflower production is represented as country’s production. It can be seen that crop albedo values are related to the crop and meteorological factors like crop phenology, soil moisture etc. Crop albedo also varies by each cultivars of sunflower. Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) albedo values and in-situ measurements were compared within this study. In the light of this perspective, albedo is considerably sensitive parameter and has influence on the latent heat flux. Also, comparison between calculated latent heat flux from MODIS data and in-situ measurements were investigated.

Can climate‐effective land management reduce regional warming?

AbstractLimiting global warming to well below 2°C is an imminent challenge for humanity. However, even if this global target can be met, some regions are still likely to experience substantial warming relative to others. Using idealized global climate simulations, we examine the potential of land management options in affecting regional climate, with a focus on crop albedo enhancement and irrigation (climate‐effective land management). The implementation is performed over all crop regions globally to provide an upper bound. We find that the implementation of both crop albedo enhancement and irrigation can reduce hot temperature extremes by more than 2°C in North America, Eurasia, and India over the 21st century relative to a scenario without management application. The efficacy of crop albedo enhancement scales with the magnitude, where a cooling response exceeding 0.5°C for hot temperature extremes was achieved with a large (i.e., ≥0.08) change in crop albedo. Regional differences were attributed to the surface energy balance response with temperature changes mostly explained by latent heat flux changes for irrigation and net shortwave radiation changes for crop albedo enhancement. However, limitations do exist, where we identify warming over the winter months when climate‐effective land management is temporarily suspended. This was associated with persistent cloud cover that enhances longwave warming. It cannot be confirmed if the magnitude of this feedback is reproducible in other climate models. Our results overall demonstrate that regional warming of hot extremes in our climate model can be partially mitigated when using an idealized treatment of climate‐effective land management.

Estimating Crop Albedo in the Application of a Physical Model Based on the Law of Energy Conservation and Spectral Invariants

Albedo characterizes the radiometric interface of land surfaces, especially vegetation, and the atmosphere. Albedo is a critical input to many models, such as crop growth models, hydrological models and climate models. For the extensive attention to crop monitoring, a physical albedo model for crops is developed based on the law of energy conservation and spectral invariants, which is derived from a prior forest albedo model. The model inputs have been efficiently and physically parameterized, including the dependency of albedo on the solar zenith/azimuth angle, the fraction of diffuse skylight in the incident radiance, the canopy structure, the leaf reflectance/transmittance and the soil reflectance characteristics. Both the anisotropy of soil reflectance and the clumping effect of crop leaves at the canopy scale are considered, which contribute to the improvement of the model accuracy. The comparison between the model results and Monte Carlo simulation results indicates that the canopy albedo has high accuracy with an RMSE < 0.005. The validation using ground measurements has also demonstrated the reliability of the model and that it can reflect the interaction mechanism between radiation and the canopy-soil system.

A comparison of temperature and precipitation responses to different Earth radiation management geoengineering schemes

AbstractEarth radiation management has been suggested as a way to rapidly counteract global warming in the face of a lack of mitigation efforts, buying time and avoiding potentially catastrophic warming. We compare six different radiation management schemes that use surface, troposphere, and stratosphere interventions in a single climate model in which we projected future climate from 2020 to 2099 based on RCP4.5. We analyze the surface air temperature responses to determine how effective the schemes are at returning temperature to its 1986–2005 climatology and analyze precipitation responses to compare side effects. We find crop albedo enhancement is largely ineffective at returning temperature to its 1986–2005 climatology. Desert albedo enhancement causes excessive cooling in the deserts and severe shifts in tropical precipitation. Ocean albedo enhancement, sea‐spray geoengineering, cirrus cloud thinning, and stratospheric SO2 injection have the potential to cool more uniformly, but cirrus cloud thinning may not be able to cool by much more than 1 K globally. We find that of the schemes potentially able to return surface air temperature to 1986–2005 climatology under future greenhouse gas warming, none has significantly less severe precipitation side effects than other schemes. Despite different forcing patterns, ocean albedo enhancement, sea‐spray geoengineering, cirrus cloud thinning, and stratospheric SO2 injection all result in large scale tropical precipitation responses caused by Hadley cell changes and land precipitation changes largely driven by thermodynamic changes. Widespread regional scale changes in precipitation over land are significantly different from the 1986–2005 climatology and would likely necessitate significant adaptation despite geoengineering.

Regional climate change mitigation with crops: context and assessment

The intention of this review is to place crop albedo biogeoengineering in the wider picture of climate manipulation. Crop biogeoengineering is considered within the context of the long-term modification of the land surface for agriculture over several thousand years. Biogeoengineering is also critiqued in relation to other geoengineering schemes in terms of mitigation power and adherence to social principles for geoengineering. Although its impact is small and regional, crop biogeoengineering could be a useful and inexpensive component of an ensemble of geoengineering schemes to provide temperature mitigation. The method should not detrimentally affect food security and there may even be positive impacts on crop productivity, although more laboratory and field research is required in this area to understand the underlying mechanisms.

Can crop albedo be increased through the modification of leaf trichomes, and could this cool regional climate?

Managing the land surface to increase albedo to offset regional warming has received less attention than managing the land surface to sequester carbon. We test whether increasing agricultural albedo can cool regional climate. We first used the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM 3.0) coupled to the Community Land Model (CLM 3.0) to assess the broad climatic effects of a hypothetical implementation of a strategy in which the albedo of cropland regions is increased using high albedo crops. Simulations indicate that planting brighter crops can decrease summertime maximum daily 2 m air temperature by 0.25°C per 0.01 increase in surface albedo at high latitudes (>30°). However, planting brighter crops at low latitudes (<30°) may have negative repercussions including warming the land surface and decreasing precipitation, because increasing the land surface albedo tends to preferentially decrease latent heat fluxes to the atmosphere, which decreases cloud cover and rainfall. We then test a possible method for increasing crop albedo by measuring the range of albedo within 16 isolines of soybeans that differ only with trichome color, orientation, and density but find that such modifications had only minor impacts on leaf albedo. Increasing agricultural albedo may cool high latitude regional climate, but increasing plant albedo sufficiently to offset potential future warming will require larger changes to plant albedo than are currently available.

Radiation balance of an alfalfa crop in Saudi Arabia

Short-wave reflectivity or albedo is an important component of net radiationwhich represents the major determinant of radiation balance of crop surface. This study was conducted on an irrigated alfalfa crop field at Al-Kharj agricultural area in Saudi Arabia, grown according to normal agricultural practices. Data on radiation balance and crop cover were collected over a number of days from March to October 1986, crop albedo varying from 0–4 in early morning to 0–20 at noon, the overall mean value of the crop albedo being estimated at 0–26. The relation between the individual components of radiation balance was studied, and a significant correlation between incident radiation and net radiation was found. Possible causes responsible for changes in crop albedo were discussed.

Radiation components over bare and planted soils in a greenhouse

The radiation components that comprise net total radiation, incoming and outgoing solar and longwave radiation were measured over bare and planted soils in a greenhouse at the Solar Energy Research Center, Baghdad, Iraq. Crop albedo values were calculated and net radiation related to solar radiation by regression analysis. This paper shows that the crop albedo was close to 0.25 when the greenhouse floor was completely covered. The crop reflection coefficient decreased markedly with higher solar elevation. Heating coefficient values were consistently positive and ranged between 0.18 and 0.41 during the growing season. The net radiation was strongly correlated to the incoming solar radiation inside the greenhouse. Incorporating albedo in the linear relationship between net and net shortwave radiation was unnecessary.

Short-wave albedo of soil and jowar crop

Measurements of albedo of jowar were made during the kharif season of 1970. The diurnal variation of crop albedo under different sky conditions is discussed. The average noontime albedo of jowar was 22 per cent compared to the soil albedo of 11 per cent. There is a strong dependence of crop albedo on solar elevation under clear sky conditions; the dependence is relatively weak under cloudy conditions. The midday crop albedo values do not change significantly with cloudiness.&#x0D; &#x0D; The seasonal trend of midday albedo of jowar shows an increase of albedo with crop growth, till it reaches 25 per cent when the crop was 55 days old, remains steady for 15 day" and decreases gradually thereafter to about 18 per cent as the crop matures.

Global radiation within corn

Global and net solar radiation profiles were measured by traversing sensors at four heights in a square-sown plot and a row plot of field corn on four relatively cloudless days in August 1972. The fluxes and their vertical distributions are discussed. A numerical model of the short-wave radiation fluxes in a canopy is presented. Using leaf area index and fixed leaf radiative properties, calculated values of radiation are within 10% of measurements in most instances. The performance under predominantly beam or diffuse radiation is similar and model values of crop albedo compare well with values calculated from radiation measurements above the crops.

Reflection coefficients, heating coefficients and net radiation at Simcoe, southern Ontario

Point measurements of incoming and reflected solar radiation and net radiation were made over several crop surfaces at the Simcoe Horticultural Experiment Station in southern Ontario. Crop albedo values were calculated and net radiation related to solar radiation by regression analysis. These show that: (1) albedo is close to the value of 0.25 postulated by Monteith (1959a) for crops which completely covered the ground; (2) the albedo of leaves stripped from the plant and mounted on a horizontal board is larger than crop values; (3) crop albedo increases markedly at low solar elevations but the increase is of little importance in terms of absorbed solar radiation because of the low level of the solar intensity; (4) heating coefficient values are consistently positive but show no relationship with surface cover and season; (5) there is no advantage to incorporating albedo in the linear relationship between net and net short-wave radiation; and (6) one equation fits the data satisfactorily and is similar to other proposed equations relating net and solar radiation.