An Increase in Precipitation Driven by Irrigation over the North China Plain Based on RegCM and WRF Simulations

Abstract Anthropogenic land-use change, irrigation, is considered to strongly modulate the hydroclimate at the regional scale by directly triggering evaporative cooling as the preliminary local effect. However, subsequent interactions with the background climate are highly nonlinear, which introduces diverse and unexpected consequences. The North China Plain (NCP) is one of the regions where irrigation has expanded the most rapidly since the twentieth century. The scarce rainfall in this region makes it necessary for irrigation to supplement the level of soil water for agricultural production. In this study, we quantify the effect of irrigation on the regional climate in China. Two regional climate models, WRF and RegCM, are used to mimic the large-scale practice of irrigation on the NCP. The results of our experiments show consistent cooling and moistening effects centered over the NCP across all experiments. Although the moisture budget and wind field pattern demonstrate that the vertical downdraft and low-level divergence could inhibit rainfall, the humidification dominates the climatic response in the dry April–June and increases the amount of precipitation significantly and consistently in the NCP region and the surrounding area in northern China. The enhanced CAPE increases sharply on some “calm days” when the vertical moisture advection is small, especially during the afternoon, triggering frequent light rains convectively by destabilizing the atmosphere. The consistent response to irrigation in two different models that employ structurally different land surface schemes could enhance the robustness of the physical mechanism behind the precipitation increase in the heavily irrigated region of NCP.