Identification

Title

On the intercontinental transferability of regional climate model response to severe forestation

Abstract

The biogeophysical effects of severe forestation are quantified using a new ensemble of regional climate simulations over North America and Europe. Following the protocol outlined for the Land-Use and Climate Across Scales (LUCAS) intercomparison project, two sets of simulations are compared, FOREST and GRASS, which respectively represent worlds where all vegetation is replaced by trees and grasses. Three regional climate models were run over North America. One of them, the Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM5), was also run over Europe in an attempt to bridge results with the original LUCAS ensemble, which was confined to Europe. Overall, the CRCM5 response to forestation reveals strong inter-continental similarities, including a pronounced wintertime and springtime warming concentrated over snow-masking evergreen forests. Crucially, these northern evergreen needleleaf forests populate lower, hence sunnier, latitudes in North America than in Europe. Snow masking reduces albedo similarly over both continents, but stronger insolation amplifies the net shortwave radiation and hence warming simulated over North America. In the summertime, CRCM5 produces a mixed response to forestation, with warming over northern needleleaf forests and cooling over southern broadleaf forests. The partitioning of the turbulent heat fluxes plays a major role in determining this response, but it is not robust across models over North America. Implications for the inter-continental transferability of the original LUCAS results are discussed.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7ks6wbv

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2022-09-23T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact