The impact of land cover change on the atmospheric circulation |
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Authors: | M Zhao A J Pitman T Chase |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Physical Geography, Macquarie University, North Ryde, 2109, Australia E-mail: apitman@penman.es.mq.edu.au, AU;(2) Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA, US |
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Abstract: | The NCAR Community Climate Model (version 3), coupled to the Biosphere Atmosphere Transfer scheme and a mixed layer ocean
model is used to investigate the impact on the climate of a conservative change from natural to present land cover. Natural
vegetation cover was obtained from an ecophysiologically constrained biome model. The current vegetation cover was obtained
by perturbing the natural cover from forest to grass over areas where land cover has been observed to change. Simulations
were performed for 17 years for each case (results from the last 15 years are presented here). We find that land cover changes,
largely constrained to the tropics, SE Asia, North America and Europe, cause statistically significant changes in regional
temperature and precipitation but cause no impact on the globally averaged temperature or precipitation. The perturbation
in land cover in the tropics and SE Asia teleconnect to higher latitudes by changing the position and strength of key elements
of the general circulation (the Hadley and Walker circulations). Many of the areas where statistically significant changes
occur are remote from the location of land cover change. Historical land cover change is not typically included in transitory
climate simulations, and it may be that the simulation of the patterns of temperature change over the twentieth century by
climate models will be further improved by taking it into account.
Received: 27 May 1999 / Accepted: July 2000 |
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