Abstract
Land use changes have great potential to influence temperature extremes. However, contradictory summer daytime temperature responses to deforestation are reported between observations and climate models. Here we present a pertinent comparison between multiple satellite-based datasets and climate model deforestation experiments. Observationally-based methods rely on a space-for-time assumption, which compares neighboring locations with contrasting land covers as a proxy for land use changes over time without considering possible atmospheric feedbacks. Offline land simulations or subgrid-level analyses agree with observed warming effects only when the space-for-time assumption is replicated. However, deforestation-related cloud and radiation effects manifest in coupled climate simulations and observations at larger scales, which show that a reduction of hot extremes with deforestation – as simulated in a number of CMIP5 models – is possible. Our study provides a design and analysis methodology for land use change studies and highlights the importance of including land-atmosphere coupling, which can alter deforestation-induced temperature changes.
Highlights
Land use changes have great potential to influence temperature extremes
The climate model-based sensitivity studies, where separate integrations with and without LULCC are compared, necessarily reflect atmospheric feedbacks that are fundamentally different between scenarios, an arrangement that conflicts with the assumptions of local detection of LULCC signals
Because land–atmosphere interactions are strong during the warm season[26,27], we focus on the summer daytime temperature in this study
Summary
Land use changes have great potential to influence temperature extremes. contradictory summer daytime temperature responses to deforestation are reported between observations and climate models. Most of the observationbased studies focus on the contrast between nearby locations that have different land cover (e.g., forest vs open land12–14,18,20,21) or that have undergone different land cover change scenarios (e.g., deforestation vs afforestation[22,23]) These observational studies using data from flux towers or satellite retrievals contain an assumption that the neighboring land units share the same atmospheric background state and differences in surface temperature can be attributed solely to LULCC. This space-fortime analogy works for detecting the local impacts of deforestation, but two issues emerge when comparing the observed local impacts with model simulations. A set of deforestation simulations is conducted using the Community Earth System Model (CESM24)
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