Abstract
This study examines the impact of historical land-cover change on North American surface climate, focusing on the robustness of the climate signal with respect to representation of sub-grid heterogeneity and land biogeophysics within a climate model. We performed four paired climate simulations with the Community Atmosphere Model using two contrasting land models and two different representations of land-cover change. One representation used a biome classification without subgrid-scale heterogeneity while the other used high-resolution satellite data to prescribe multiple vegetation types within a grid cell. Present-day and natural vegetation datasets were created for both representations. All four sets of climate simulations showed that present-day vegetation has cooled the summer climate in regions of North America compared to natural vegetation. The simulated magnitude and spatial extent of summer cooling due to land-cover change was reduced when the biome-derived land-cover change datasets were replaced by the satellite-derived datasets. The diminished cooling is partly due to reduced intensity of agriculture in the satellite-derived datasets. Comparison of the two land-surface models showed that the use of a comparatively warmer and drier land model in conjunction with satellite-derived datasets further reduced the simulated magnitude of summer cooling. These results suggest that the cooling signal associated with North American land-cover change is robust but the magnitude and therefore detection of the signal depends on the realism of the datasets used to represent land-cover change and the parametrisation of land biogeophysics.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Richard Betts and an anonymous reviewer for comments that improved the manuscript. Navin Ramankutty and Jonathan Foley are thanked for providing the global croplands data. This work was supported by the NASA Land Cover Land Use Change program through a grant W-19,735. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
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Oleson, K.W., Bonan, G.B., Levis, S. et al. Effects of land use change on North American climate: impact of surface datasets and model biogeophysics. Climate Dynamics 23, 117–132 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-004-0426-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-004-0426-9