Around 70 Mha of land cover changes (LCCs) occurred in Europe from 1992 to 2015. Despite LCCs being an important driver of regional climate variations, their temperature effects at a continental scale have not yet been assessed. Here, we integrate maps of historical LCCs with a regional climate model to investigate air temperature and humidity effects. We find an average temperature change of −0.12 ± 0.20 °C, with widespread cooling (up to −1.0 °C) in western and central Europe in summer and spring. At continental scale, the mean cooling is mainly correlated with agriculture abandonment (cropland-to-forest transitions), but a new approach based on ridge-regression decomposing the temperature change to the individual land transitions shows opposite responses to cropland losses and gains between western and eastern Europe. Effects of historical LCCs on European climate are non-negligible and region-specific, and ignoring land-climate biophysical interactions may lead to sub-optimal climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) simulations with different selections of subgrid orographic drag over the Tibetan Plateau have been evaluated with observation and ERA‐Interim reanalysis. Results show that the subgrid orographic drag schemes, especially the turbulent orographic form drag (TOFD) scheme, efficiently reduce the 10 m wind speed bias and RMS error with respect to station measurements. With the combination of gravity wave, flow blocking and TOFD schemes, wind speed is simulated more realistically than with the individual schemes only. Improvements are also seen in the 2 m air temperature and surface pressure. The gravity wave drag, flow blocking drag, and TOFD schemes combined have the smallest station mean bias (−2.05°C in 2 m air temperature and 1.27 hPa in surface pressure) and RMS error (3.59°C in 2 m air temperature and 2.37 hPa in surface pressure). Meanwhile, the TOFD scheme contributes more to the improvements than the gravity wave drag and flow blocking schemes. The improvements are more pronounced at low levels of the atmosphere than at high levels due to the stronger drag enhancement on the low‐level flow. The reduced near‐surface cold bias and high‐pressure bias over the Tibetan Plateau are the result of changes in the low‐level wind components associated with the geostrophic balance. The enhanced drag directly leads to weakened westerlies but also enhances the a‐geostrophic flow in this case reducing (enhancing) the northerlies (southerlies), which bring more warm air across the Himalaya Mountain ranges from South Asia (bring less cold air from the north) to the interior Tibetan Plateau.