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A comparison of a GCM response to historical anthropogenic land cover change and model sensitivity to uncertainty in present-day land cover representations

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Abstract

This study assesses the sensitivity of the fully coupled NCAR-DOE PCM to three different representations of present-day land cover, based on IPCC SRES land cover information. We conclude that there is significant model sensitivity to current land cover characterization, with an observed average global temperature range of 0.21 K between the simulations. Much larger contrasts (up to 5 K) are found on the regional scale; however, these changes are largely offsetting on the global scale. These results show that significant biases can be introduced when outside data sources are used to conduct anthropogenic land cover change experiments in GCMs that have been calibrated to their own representation of present-day land cover. We conclude that hybrid systems that combine the natural vegetation from the native GCM datasets combined with human land cover information from other sources are best for simulating such impacts. We also performed a prehuman simulation, which had a 0.39 K ~higher average global temperature and, perhaps of greater importance, temperature changes regionally of about 2 K. In this study, the larger regional changes coincide with large-scale agricultural areas. The initial cooling from energy balance changes appear to create feedbacks that intensify mid-latitude circulation features and weaken the summer monsoon circulation over Asia, leading to further cooling. From these results, we conclude that land cover change plays a significant role in anthropogenically forced climate change. Because these changes coincide with regions of the highest human population this climate impact could have a disproportionate impact on human systems. Therefore, it is important that land cover change be included in past and future climate change simulations.

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Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Rik Leemans for providing the SRES data, and Tom Bettge and Lawrence Buja for their assistance in running the experiments, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the Office of Science (BER), US Department of Energy, Cooperative Agreement No. DE-FC02-97ER62402, the National Science Foundation grant numbers ATM-0107404, and ATM-0413540, the NCAR Weather and Climate Impact Assessment Science Initiative funded by NSF, and the University of Kansas, Center for Research.

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  1. Department of Geography, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Johannes Feddema

  2. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, 80305, USA

    Keith Oleson, Gordon Bonan, Linda Mearns, Warren Washington, Gerald Meehl & Douglas Nychka

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  1. Johannes Feddema
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  2. Keith Oleson
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  6. Gerald Meehl
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Correspondence to Johannes Feddema.

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Feddema, J., Oleson, K., Bonan, G. et al. A comparison of a GCM response to historical anthropogenic land cover change and model sensitivity to uncertainty in present-day land cover representations. Climate Dynamics 25, 581–609 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-005-0038-z

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