A model-based evaluation of the effects of irrigation expansion on regional and global land surface climate

Irrigation is essential for enhancing agricultural productivity and satisfying global food demand. The challenge of feeding a growing population without increasing cultivated land can be addressed partly by expanding irrigation into currently rain-fed croplands. At the same time, water-scarce regions with currently unsustainable irrigation practices may experience a reduction in irrigated area. While the evaporative cooling effect of irrigation on regional climate has been extensively studied, it is still unclear how different irrigation expansion (or contraction) scenarios would affect global and regional near-surface climatic conditions. Here we evaluate the hydro-climatic impacts of several irrigation expansion scenarios. To assess changes in evapotranspiration (ET) and land surface temperature (LST) under various irrigation scenarios, we incorporated and validated an irrigation model representing four main irrigation methods: sprinkler, drip, furrow, and flood-paddy, into the NASA C..., , # Data from: A model-based evaluation of the effects of irrigation expansion on regional and global land surface climate

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.5tb2rbpfd](10.5061/dryad.5tb2rbpfd)

## Description of the data and file structure

These data are used in \"A model-based evaluation of the effects of irrigation expansion on regional and global land surface climate\", Earth's Future.

### Files and variables

**Validation.nc4** contains:

* SiteID refers to the flux tower identifiers from the datasets by Pastorello et al. (2020) [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0534-3](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0534-3) and Volk et al. (2023) [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7636781](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7636781), which were used for the validation.
* Latitude_fluxT, Longitude_fluxT, Latitude_CLSM, Longitude_CLSM: respectively latitude, longitude for each flux tower site (fluxT), and for the 9km EASE grid V2 used with Catchment Land Surface Model (CLSM) containing the flux tower site.
*...,