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Agricultural Cool Island Rezaul Mahmood1 and Kenneth G. Hubbard2 Our past investigations to understand the impacts of agriculture land use have shown that the conversion of land use from natural grass to irrigated agriculture enhanced soil water storage in the root zone and increased latent energy flux. Analyses of long-term temperature data show, due to this increase in latent energy flux over the last century, there has been a decreasing trend in mean maximum temperature over the irrigated areas of the Great Plains of North America. Similar studies by other researchers also show cool anomaly of mean maximum temperatures over non-irrigated agricultural land uses. This type of land use changes and their impacts on local and regional climate in other parts of the world is also reported by scientists. In the context of these findings we propose a new term, 'Agricultural Cool Island' (ACI). The present paper synthesizes previous findings and justifies the need for more focused studies on ACI and their influence on local and regional climate and hydrology. |