Potential impact of U.S. biofuels on regional climate
Recently, I came across this nice article published in JGR, which talks about impact of using biofuels on regional climate in the United States . The debate on using biofuels for future energy needs is on. Abstract reads as “ Recent work has shown that current bio-energy policy directives may have harmful, indirect consequences, affecting both food security and the global climate system. An additional unintended but direct effect of large-scale biofuel production is the impact on local and regional climate resulting from changes in the energy and moisture balance of the surface upon conversion to biofuel crops. Using the latest version of the WRF modeling system we conducted twenty-four, midsummer, continental-wide, sensitivity experiments by imposing realistic biophysical parameter limits appropriate for bio-energy crops in the Corn Belt of the United States . In the absence of strain/crop-specific parameterizations, a primary goal of this work was to isolate the maximum regional cl...