Abstract
The project Land-Use and Climate, Identification of Robust Impacts (LUCID) was conceived to address the robustness of biogeophysical impacts of historical land use–land cover change (LULCC). LUCID used seven atmosphere–land models with a common experimental design to explore those impacts of LULCC that are robust and consistent across the climate models. The biogeophysical impacts of LULCC were also compared to the impact of elevated greenhouse gases and resulting changes in sea surface temperatures and sea ice extent (CO2SST). Focusing the analysis on Eurasia and North America, this study shows that for a number of variables LULCC has an impact of similar magnitude but of an opposite sign, to increased greenhouse gases and warmer oceans. However, the variability among the individual models’ response to LULCC is larger than that found from the increase in CO2SST. The results of the study show that although the dispersion among the models’ response to LULCC is large, there are a number of robust common features shared by all models: the amount of available energy used for turbulent fluxes is consistent between the models and the changes in response to LULCC depend almost linearly on the amount of trees removed. However, less encouraging is the conclusion that there is no consistency among the various models regarding how LULCC affects the partitioning of available energy between latent and sensible heat fluxes at a specific time. The results therefore highlight the urgent need to evaluate land surface models more thoroughly, particularly how they respond to a perturbation in addition to how they simulate an observed average state.
Highlights
While the land surface modeling community would basically agree that land use–land cover change (LULCC) is a significant driver of climate through physical effects, there is no consensus on what this statement means
The goal of this paper is to provide a detailed examination of why the land surface models (LSMs) diverge in their response to LULCC and to provide advice on how to better approach realistic responses of climate models to such perturbations in the future
LUCID undertook a suite of climate model simulations, designed to diagnose and quantify the robust impacts of LULCC on climate between the preindustrial
Summary
NATHALIE DE NOBLET-DUCOUDRE ,* JUAN-PABLO BOISIER,* ANDY PITMAN, G. # National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado @ Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany. & Groupe d’Etude de l’Atmosphere Meteorologique, Toulouse, France ** Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, Netherlands. 11 Earth System Analysis, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany ## PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Bilthoven, Netherlands (Manuscript received 17 June 2011, in final form 26 October 2011)
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