Comparison of the climate simulated by the CCM3 coupled to two different land-surface models

Abstract

We present results from a coupled atmosphere–biosphere model CCM3/IBIS (the Community Climate Model coupled to the Integrated BIosphere Simulator), which is designed to study the dynamic interactions between climate and vegetation and the global carbon cycle. We analyze the climate simulated by CCM3/IBIS with fixed vegetation conditions and we compare it to the climate simulated by the standard CCM3, which includes the LSM (land surface model) land-surface package. Important differences between the two models include simple parametrizations of lakes, wetlands and crops in CCM3/LSM not taken into account in CCM3/IBIS. CCM3/IBIS and CCM3/LSM share common biases (compared to observations) in the temperature field in boreal winter and in the precipitation field annually, making the atmospheric model the most probable cause of those biases. The models differ in the temperature field and surface energy balance in the Sahara annually and in the mid-to high latitudes from spring through fall. CCM3/IBIS simulates global annual air temperatures that are on average 1.7 °C higher than CCM3/LSM and 0.5 °C higher than the observed climatology. Differences in albedo and/or snow parametrization explain most of the Sahara and high-latitude temperature disagreement. Our sensitivity study with CCM3/LSM shows that the presence of lakes and wetlands in CCM3/LSM can account for about half of the difference in temperature in summer over the lake and wetland regions of the mid-latitudes. A second sensitivity study shows that higher surface roughness length in CCM3/IBIS can also explain part of the difference in summer surface temperature in the mid-latitudes. Surface roughness length affects the surface temperature through a feedback mechanism linking surface wind speed, planetary boundary layer height, low level cloudiness and radiation