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Model simulations show that land use and land cover changes(LUCC) may alter surface energy budget and influence surface microclimate, but up to now, it still lacks of sufficient observations for explaining the mechanism of climate change brought about by LUCC. Grasslands and shrub lands are typical land covers in the mid-latitude arid zone of the northern hemisphere. The data used in this paper was collected from four sites which are related to grassland, open shrubland, savanna and closed shrubland, and all located in New Mexico, USA. The four sites are near each other and have the same background in climate and weather. Thus, the difference in surface energy partitioning over the four surfaces is induced by different land processes, which was explained in our study. The paper also analyzed the feedbacks of different land surface parameters and energy partitioning for the surface microclimate.

We find that the leaf area index(LAI) and surface roughness of the four sites increases from the desert grassland to the closed shrubland. The difference in vegetation structures and functions also affects aerodynamic resistance and surface resistance to heat transfer and the resistances exhibit larger over sparse surfaces. Generally, the sites with high vegetation cover have higher net radiation, sensible and latent heat fluxes, particularly in the growing season. In addition, the contributions of impacting factors to the turbulent fluxes are diagnosed by Penman-Monteith equation and a mathematical formula combining net radiation with Bowen ratio. Compared to the desert grassland, the variations in net radiation over other three surfaces indicate positive contributions to both sensible and latent heat fluxes and govern their changes. The variations in the aerodynamic resistance and the surface resistance lead to opposite contributions. Besides, both radiative surface temperature and surface air temperature over the sparse surfaces are significantly higher than that over the closed shrubland. Larger aerodynamic resistance and Bowen ratio over the sparse vegetation dominate the warming trend accompanying the vegetation degradation and simultaneously offset the cooling effect induced by the decrease in net radiation, showing the land surface process over different surfaces factually has an evident feedback on surface micro-climate in the same climate and weather background.