Land cover changes on the southern brazilian fields: modeling of impacts on land surface energy fluxes

In this work, we investigated the impacts of land cover changes on the surface energy balance, on the Campos Sulinos of Southern Brazilian. For this, we used the INLAND model to simulate the multiple processes that occur in the soil-vegetation-atmosphere system, considering three experiments, called control (ctrl), agriculture (agr) and bare soil (bar). The results showed that the model was able to satisfactorily represent the surface energy flux considering the natural vegetation in the Pampa biome. The changes in the physiological parameters showed the great influence that the vegetation cover exerts on the components of the surface energy balance, especially in relation to the reduction of the net radiation (approximately 20 % in the conversion 1 and 40 % in the conversion 2), caused largely by the increase in surface albedo (around 10 % in the conversion 1 and 17 % in the conversion 2). Consequently, latent and sensitive heat fluxes also show a significant reduction.