Projections of Future Land Use. The land use map we use to evaluate the effects past land use change on climate obtained through the North America Land Cover (NALC) data (year 2005, shown in Figure 6 below). The NALC dataset was produced by Canada Centre for Remote Sensing from observations acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS/Terra), at a 250-meter spatial and 10-day temporal resolution. In addition to the map of land use for the year 2005, we also have projections of land use for the future (year 2050, shown in Figure 6 below) to simulate future scenarios. The future land use projection is obtained by merging the North America Land Cover data (NALC, 2005) with projection data. For the most part of Arizona, we use the State of Arizona’s land use projection that was generated by Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) using the Red Dot Algorithm (RDA). The algorithm could be simply stated as follows: 1) dividing the land-use extent and pattern according to land ownership of Arizona, 2) exclude areas that are unlikely to develop or likely to develop relative slowly into urban areas, e.g., military base, natural parks, forests, native American lands, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands, flood plains and steep slopes, 3) the rest of which are State Trust lands and private lands that are places where future development would possibly occur. For the areas around and south of Tucson, an urban developing model named SLEUTH model was used to simulate future condition (Xxxxxx et al., 2012).
