Land–atmosphere interactions in sub-polar and alpine climates in the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study Land Use and Climate Across Scales (LUCAS) models – Part 2: The role of changing vegetation
Creators
- Mooney, Priscilla A.1
- Rechid, Diana2
- Davin, Edouard L.3
- Katragkou, Eleni4
- Noblet-Ducoudré, Natalie de5
- Breil, Marcus6
- Cardoso, Rita M.7
- Daloz, Anne Sophie8
- Hoffmann, Peter2
- Lima, Daniela C. A.7
- Meyer, Ronny9
- Soares, Pedro M. M.7
- Sofiadis, Giannis4
- Strada, Susanna10
- Strandberg, Gustav11
- Toelle, Merja H.12
- Lund, Marianne T.8
- 1. NORCE Norwegian Research Centre, Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway
- 2. Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, Hamburg, Germany
- 3. 3Wyss Academy for Nature, Climate and Environmental Physics, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
- 4. Department of Meteorology and Climatology, School of Geology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
- 5. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, Paris, France
- 6. Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
- 7. Instituto Dom Luiz, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1749-016 Lisbon, Portugal
- 8. CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway
- 9. Wyss Academy for Nature, Climate and Environmental Physics, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
- 10. International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy
- 11. Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Norrköping, Sweden
- 12. Center for Environmental Systems Research, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
Description
Land cover in sub-polar and alpine regions of northern and eastern Europe have already begun changing due to natural and anthropogenic changes such as afforesta- tion. This will impact the regional climate and hydrology upon which societies in these regions are highly reliant. This study aims to identify the impacts of afforestation/re- forestation (hereafter afforestation) on snow and the snow- albedo effect and highlight potential improvements for fu- ture model development. The study uses an ensemble of nine regional climate models for two different idealised experi- ments covering a 30-year period; one experiment replaces most land cover in Europe with forest, while the other exper- iment replaces all forested areas with grass. The ensemble consists of nine regional climate models composed of differ- ent combinations of five regional atmospheric models and six land surface models. Results show that afforestation reduces the snow-albedo sensitivity index and enhances snowmelt.
While the direction of change is robustly modelled, there is still uncertainty in the magnitude of change. The great- est differences between models emerge in the snowmelt sea- son. One regional climate model uses different land surface models which shows consistent changes between the three simulations during the accumulation period but differs in the snowmelt season. Together these results point to the need for further model development in representing both grass– snow and forest–snow interactions during the snowmelt sea- son. Pathways to accomplishing this include (1) a more so- phisticated representation of forest structure, (2) kilometre- scale simulations, and (3) more observational studies on vegetation–snow interactions in northern Europe.
Files
P002_Y2022_Mooney_et_al_2022.pdf
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