Abstract
Abstract. Earth system models (ESMs) use bottom boundaries for their land surface model (LSM) components which are shallower than the depth reached by surface temperature changes in the centennial timescale associated with recent climate change. Shallow bottom boundaries reflect energy to the surface, which along with the lack of geothermal heat flux in current land surface models, alter the surface energy balance and therefore affect some feedback processes between the ground surface and the atmosphere, such as permafrost and soil carbon stability. To evaluate these impacts, we modified the subsurface model in the Community Land Model version 4.5 (CLM4.5) by setting a non-zero crustal heat flux bottom boundary condition uniformly across the model and by increasing the depth of the lower boundary from 42.1 to 342.1 m. The modified and original land models were run during the period 1901–2005 under the historical forcing and between 2005 and 2300 under forcings for two future scenarios of moderate (Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5; RCP4.5) and high (RCP8.5) emissions. Increasing the thickness of the subsurface by 300 m increases the heat stored in the subsurface by 72 ZJ (1 ZJ = 1021 J) by the year 2300 for the RCP4.5 scenario and 201 ZJ for the RCP8.5 scenario (respective increases of 260 % and 217 % relative to the shallow model), reduces the loss of near-surface permafrost area in the Northern Hemisphere between 1901 and 2300 by 1.6 %–1.9 %, reduces the loss of intermediate-depth permafrost area (above 42.1 m depth) by a factor of 3–5.5 and reduces the loss of soil carbon by 1.6 %–3.6 %. Each increase of 20 mW m−2 of the crustal heat flux increases the temperature at 3.8 m (the soil–bedrock interface) by 0.04±0.01 K. This decreases near-surface permafrost area slightly (0.3 %–0.8 %) and produces local differences in initial stable size of the soil carbon pool across the permafrost region, which reduces the loss of soil carbon across the region by as much as 1.1 %–5.6 % for the two scenarios. Reducing subsurface thickness from 42.1 to 3.8 m, used by many LSMs, produces a larger effect than increasing it to 342.1 m, because 3.8 m is not enough to damp the annual signal and the subsurface closely follows the air temperature. We determine the optimal subsurface thickness to be 100 m for a 100-year simulation and 200 m for a simulation of 400 years. We recommend short-term simulations to use a subsurface of at least 40 m, to avoid the perturbation of seasonal temperature propagation.
Highlights
In the current context of anthropogenic climate change, there is a need to forecast future impacts of climate change as reliably as possible
We study the effect of increasing the lower boundary depth and adding a geothermal heat flux at the base of CLM4.5 (Oleson et al, 2013), which is the deepest (42.1 m) land surface model (LSM) used in CMIP5 (Stocker et al, 2013)
By the end of the simulation, the thickest model (d = 342.1 m) has absorbed 72 ZJ (72 × 1021 J) in the RCP4.5 scenario and 201 ZJ in the RCP8.5 scenario, which are, respectively, 3.6 and 3.17 times the heat stored by the original model
Summary
In the current context of anthropogenic climate change, there is a need to forecast future impacts of climate change as reliably as possible. Climate change projections are based on simulations from ensembles of Earth system models (ESMs), numerical models of oceans, atmosphere, land, ice and biosphere subsystems coupled together (Stocker et al, 2013). Modeling of the land system has mainly focused on the interactions between the land surface and the atmosphere (Pitman, 2003), including biogeochemical cycles taking place in the shallow subsurface or soil, such as carbon dynamics (Ramanathan and Carmichael, 2008), soil moisture (Seneviratne et al, 2010), vegetation cover and land use (Bonan, 2008), and surface processes such as albedo and snow cover. (Hansen and Nazarenko, 2004). In these land surface model (LSMs), the bedrock layer present below soil is impermeable, and when explicitly modeled, the only process taking place in bedrock is thermal diffusion
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