Abstract
Abstract. Various studies have shown the importance of Earth System feedbacks in the climate system and the necessity of including these in models used for making climate change projections. The HadGEM2 family of Met Office Unified Model configurations combines model components which facilitate the representation of many different processes within the climate system, including atmosphere, ocean and sea ice, and Earth System components including the terrestrial and oceanic carbon cycle and tropospheric chemistry. We examine the climatology of the Asian summer monsoon in present-day simulations and in idealised climate change experiments. Members of the HadGEM2 family are used, with a common physical framework (one of which includes tropospheric chemistry and an interactive terrestrial and oceanic carbon cycle), to investigate whether such components affect the way in which the monsoon changes. We focus particularly on the role of interactive vegetation in the simulations from these model configurations. Using an atmosphere-only HadGEM2 configuration, we investigate how the changes in land cover which result from the interaction between the dynamic vegetation and the model systematic rainfall biases affect the Asian summer monsoon, both in the present-day and in future climate projections. We demonstrate that the response of the dynamic vegetation to biases in regional climate, such as lack of rainfall over tropical dust-producing regions, can affect both the present-day simulation and the response to climate change forcing scenarios.
Highlights
The term “Earth System processes”, as used in climate modelling, generally refers to the set of equations describing physical, chemical and biological processes within and between the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and the terrestrial and marine biosphere
We examine the influence of changes in land cover resulting from the interactive terrestrial carbon cycle in the HadGEM2 Earth System configuration (HadGEM2-ES) on the present-day simulation and future projections of the South Asian summer monsoon
Each is based on the standard Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) setup as described in Taylor et al (2012) and details of the baseline HadGEM2-A configuration are given in The HadGEM2 Development Team (2011)
Summary
The term “Earth System processes”, as used in climate modelling, generally refers to the set of equations describing physical, chemical and biological processes within and between the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and the terrestrial and marine biosphere. Cubasch et al, 2001; Koster et al, 2004) It is not clear, to what extent climate projections are improved by the additional complexity of including Earth System process when the resulting changes in systematic biases are taken into account. As noted by Hurrell et al (2009), given relatively large systematic errors in models, the additional feedbacks from more interactive components in Earth System models clearly increase the uncertainty in the magnitude and nature of the climate changes projected in future scenario simulations. We examine the influence of changes in land cover resulting from the interactive terrestrial carbon cycle in the HadGEM2 Earth System configuration (HadGEM2-ES) on the present-day simulation and future projections of the South Asian summer monsoon
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