Modelling vegetation and the carbon cycle as interactive elements of the climate system

Abstract

The climate system and the global carbon cycle are tightly coupled. Atmospheric carbon in the form of the radiatively active gases, carbon dioxide and methane, plays a significant role in the natural greenhouse effect. The continued increase in the atmospheric concentrations of these gases, due to human emissions, is predicted to lead to significant climatic change over the next 100 years. The best estimates suggest that more than half of the current anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are being absorbed by the ocean and by land ecosystems (Schimel et al. , 1995). In both cases the processes involved are sensitive to the climatic conditions. Temperature affects the solubility of carbon dioxide in sea water and the rate of terrestrial and oceanic biological processes. In addition, vegetation is known to respond directly to increased atmospheric CO 2 through increased photosynthesis and reduced transpiration (Sellers et al. , 1996a; Field et al. , 1995), and may also change its structure and distribution in response to any associated climate change (Betts et al. , 1997). Thus there is great potential for the biosphere to produce a feedback on the climatic change due to given human emissions. Despite this, simulations carried out with General Circulation Models (GCMs) have generally neglected the coupling between the climate and the biosphere. Indeed, vegetation distributions have been static and atmospheric concentrations of CO 2 have been prescribed based on results from simple carbon cycle models, which neglect the effects of climate change (Enting et al. , 1994). This chapter describes the inclusion of vegetation and the carbon cycle as interactive elements in a GCM. The coupled climate-carbon cycle model is able to reproduce key aspects of the observations, including the global distribution of vegetation types, seasonal and zonal variations in ocean primary production, and the interannual variability in atmospheric CO 2 . A transient simulation carried out with this model suggests that previously-neglected climate-carbon cycle feedbacks could significantly accelerate atmospheric CO 2 rise and climate change over the twenty-first century.