Relationship of the environmental risk and surface energy budget over the tibetan plateau - A remote sensing evidence approach

Abstract

The Tibetan Plateau with the average elevation above 4000km is also called "the Third Pole" of the Earth, where lies Asia's 'the Water Tower" supporting billions of people and controls the formation of East Asian monsoon. Although there are limited in situ stations over the Tibetan Plateau, the remote sensing techniques since 1980s have offered another way to characterize the spatial-temporal variations in environmental risk induced by surface radiance budget over the Tibetan Plateau. The objective of this study is to identify the risks due to the change in surface radiation budget in the Tibetan Plateau based on more than two decades of remote sensing data. The mechanism of the relationship between surface energy budget changes and corresponding impacts of environmental risks in the Tibetan Plateau can be summarized in five categories: 1) risk of snow-permafrost grassland ecosystem, 2) risk of regional variation of precipitation, 3) risk of desertification, 4) risk of regional agriculture, 5) risk of drought and heat waves. Based on fifty-year historical records of natural disaster over the Tibetan Plateau, this study first validated the accuracy of NASA/GEWEX Surface Radiation Budget (SRB 3.0) remote sensing data using eleven-year ground measurements from AsiaFLUX, ChinaFLUX, GAME-ANN and CEOP over the Tibetan Plateau, then explored the relationship between the occurrences of disaster and the variations in surface energy budget over the Tibetan Plateau from GEWEX SRB products. The result proves that both the tendency and the variation of the surface radiation budget act as important roles with the frequency and intensity of natural disasters including drought, floods and hot waves. Therefore, this paper offers a way to apply remote sensing surface radiation budget products to the environmental risk study, providing an important energy aspect of information for risk mitigation, governance and risk projections in the Tibetan Plateau.