New Editorial Meteorological Impacts on Landform Changesdownloads.hindawi.com/journals/amete/2016/8048174.pdf · 2019. 7. 30. · Editorial Meteorological Impacts on Landform Changes

EditorialMeteorological Impacts on Landform Changes

Hongming He,1 Zhongping Lai,2 and Steffen Mischke3

1 Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University and Chinese Academy of Sciencesand Ministry of Water Resources, No. 26 Xinong Road, Yangling, Shaanxi 712100, China2School of Earth Sciences, China Geosciences University (Wuhan), No. 388 Lumo Road, Hongshan, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China3Faculty of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland, Sturlugata 7, 101 Reykjavı́k, Iceland

Correspondence should be addressed to Hongming He; [email protected]

Received 29 October 2015; Accepted 29 October 2015

Copyright © 2016 Hongming He et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Surface landforms are influenced by various forces, suchas natural processes and human activities, over long-termperiods of time. Landform is the primary issue that we needto understand while addressing global change and the impactof anthropogenic activities on the environment and the pastprocesses. Landform evolution is an important aspect ofEarth Sciences and involves complicated interaction amongdifferent physical processes and environmental factors, suchas topography, underlying rock types and structures, tecton-ics, climate, vegetation, and human activities, all occurringover a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Differentlandform patterns are derived from tectonic movementsand erosion and accumulation in specific meteorologicalsettings. The exogenic meteorological forces control thehydrological conditions, the regional vegetation and fauna,and the mode and efficiency of weathering processes. Pre-served and changing landforms recorded and registeredthe meteorological conditions in the past and at present,and future topographical conditions can be simulated forchanging meteorological parameters. The investigation ofmeteorological impacts on the landform can improve theunderstanding of characteristics and processes of landformevolution and provide scientific support for the protection ofthe environment, for the maintenance of functioning riversin sustainable landscape settings.We invited investigations tocontribute original research articles as well as review articlesthat explored this issue from new aspects and used newmethodologies.

2. Climate Change

J. Fei et al. discussed the hypothesis that geological eventsdramatically affected the weather and environment in Chinaand the Korean Peninsula in historical times. The results oftheir study suggest that widespread epidemics occurred inthe summer and autumn of 1601 AD in China and Koreaand they suppose that the Huaynaputina eruption possessesa major burden of responsibility for these concurrent epi-demic outbreaks. Then, C. Li et al. take a closer into thecharacteristics of marine isotope stage 3 (MIS 3) and lakerecords of upper stream of Yangtze River in Millennial-scaleAsian monsoon and the authors suggest that signals of theDansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events were possibly transmittedto the lake evolution by Asian monsoon.

C. Zhao et al. reconstruct a vegetation succession history,explore vegetation succession responses to climate change(especially during the Holocene Megathermal), and provideevidence for the evaluation of the possible effects of futureclimate change. The result of their work suggests that veg-etation experienced five successions from cold temperaturemixed coniferous and broadleaved forest, to forest-steppe,steppe-woodland, steppe, and finally meadow-woodland inHolocene. And the Holocene warm period in NE China(7800–7300 cal yr B.P.) could have resulted in strengtheningof precipitation in northernmost NE China and encouragedthe development of broadleaved forests. T. Ning et al. ana-lyzed temporal and spatial normalized difference vegetationindex (NDVI) changes on the northern Loess Plateau andtheir correlation with climatic factors from 1998 to 2012. As

Hindawi Publishing CorporationAdvances in MeteorologyVolume 2016, Article ID 8048174, 3 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/8048174

2 Advances in Meteorology

a result, they detected positive effects of human activities,including the “Grain for Green” program and successfulenvironmental treatments at coal mining bases, in additionto other factors that improved the vegetation state.

V. Macura et al. focus on determination of the effectof water depth and flow velocity on the quality of aninstream habitat in terms of climate change using InstreamFlow Incremental Methodology (IFIM). They investigatedan optimum ratio of the weights of the flow velocity andwater depth for an assessment of the quality of an instreamhabitat. Furthermore, H. Yao et al. examine the reductions ofthe runoff and sediment load of the upper Yellow River andseparated the effects of climate change and human activities.Their results show that human activities are the major driversof the runoff and sediment load variations in the Xiliugoubasin, while climate change also contributed to the observedreductions.

3. Soil Erosion

N. N. Cheng et al. investigate the impacts of hydromete-orological changes on the evolution of erosive landformsin the Loess Plateau in the past 60 years (1950–2010). Theresult of their study shows that erosive landformswere largelyshaped by hydrometeorological characteristics in comparisonwith other contributors. It shows that there is strong positiverelationship between precipitation and erosion. In addition,C. Wang et al. investigated the sediment budget of the rivermouth reach of the Yangtze River. The results demonstratethat the river mouth reach acted as a sink but not as asource due to impoundment measures, which exacerbatesthe decrease of sediment discharge into the sea. The authorsalso discuss that uncertainties exist in examination of thesediment processes due to insufficient datasets as well asdeficiencies in the methodologies used to calculate changesin river channels.

S. S. Shin et al. propose a new equation of power law basedon the rainfall power theory under the ideal assumptionthat drop-size is uniformly distributed in constant rainfallintensity. In addition, they evaluated rainfall energy throughcomparing between existing empirical equations and equa-tion of rainfall power. This result supports the conclusionthat the rainfall energy equations can be more useful inthe development of soil erosion models due to significantincrease in sediment yield by increasing transport capacityof surface runoff in the high rainfall intensity. Moreover, H.Yao et al. also suggest that different influences rates of rainfall(climate change, human activities) change to the deviationsof runoff and sediment load could be produced by usingdifferent categories of annual precipitation.Thus, researchersneed to pay attention to the effects of rainfall intensity toavoid overestimating or underestimating the contributionsof rainfall changes to the variations of runoff and sedimentload. Moreover, a further inspection on the changes flowfrequency distribution and the water-sediment indicated thatthe implementation of soil and water conservation measuresshould be the main reason for the phenomenon.

H. Sun et al. conducted a set of sensitivity experimentsunder conditions of low and high orography in the northern

Tibetan Plateau (TP) using a regional climate model withand without the dust module to further discuss the dustdistribution and the impacts of dust effects in TP and EastAsia. As the condition of the northern TP uplift to presentaltitude, the effect of dust delays the East Asia summermonsoon onset in the southern and northern monsoonregions and greatly suppresses precipitation in East Asiacompared with results in the low terrain experiments.

4. Hydrometeorology

Y. He et al. investigate temporal and spatial variation char-acteristics of precipitation of flood season. The results showthat precipitation is affected by the large-scale circulationpatterns. Thus, they show the current trends of precipitationincrease in theYangtze River catchmentwill likely continue inthe future. B. Jun identifies the morphological changes asso-ciated with the soil erosion flow and determines the affectedarea and total volume of debris flow.He revealed both the areaaffected by the flow and the spatial distribution of sedimentswith reasonable accuracy for most of the study area, andconsiderate for technicians dealing with the protection ofthe mountain area from intense rainfall. Y. Cheng studiedthe analysis of the effects of precipitation and anthropogenicactivity on hydrologic features in Yanhe during 1961 to 2008in support for regional water management and evaluationof soil and water conservation practices. He shows not onlythat the monthly distribution of precipitation and runoff andsediment discharge is extremely uneven in the river basin, butalso that the precipitation decreased in most seasons exceptin winter with particularly decreasing precipitation in fall.

Finally, the presented papers cover various fields ofresearch (climate change, soil erosion, hydrometeorology,etc.) impressively highlighting the versatility of the modelin general and specifically in the field of landform evolutionsuch as the Riverine HABitat SIMulation (RHABSIM) modelwhich determines the quality of an aquatic habitat basedon the preferences of fish for a wider range of discharges;Community Land Model version4 (CLM4) which investi-gates response of stream flow to land use cover change andclimate change; Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)and Geographic Information System (GIS), and so forth.Moreover, most of the presented studies focus on adverseeffects of climate change and anthropogenic activities likeYangtze River, Loess Plateau, and so forth. The individualarticles highlight the need of further improvements anddevelopments.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge with gratitude the research grants kindlyprovided by the Hundred-Talent Project of the ChineseAcademy of Sciences (Dr. H.M. He, 2011009), the InnovationFrontier Project of Institute of Soil and Water Conservationof the Chinese Academy of Sciences (10502), Key ResearchProgram of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant no.KZZD-EW-04), Strategic Priority Research Program of theChinese Academy of Sciences (Grant no. XDB03020300), theState Key Laboratory of Soil Erosion andDryland Farming on

Advances in Meteorology 3

the Loess Plateau (10501-192), and the State Key Laboratoryof Soil Erosion and Dryland Farming on the Loess Plateau(K318009902-1402).

Hongming HeZhongping LaiSteffen Mischke

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New Editorial Meteorological Impacts on Landform Changesdownloads.hindawi.com/journals/amete/2016/8048174.pdf · 2019. 7. 30. · Editorial Meteorological Impacts on Landform Changes