Premium
Large‐scale simulations of snow albedo masking by forests
Author(s) -
Essery Richard
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/grl.51008
Subject(s) - albedo (alchemy) , snow , environmental science , northern hemisphere , climate model , climatology , climate change , scale (ratio) , vegetation (pathology) , atmospheric sciences , latitude , snow cover , physical geography , meteorology , geology , geography , pathology , performance art , art history , medicine , art , oceanography , cartography , geodesy
Comparisons between climate models have found large differences in predictions for the albedo of forested regions with snow cover, leading to uncertainty in the strength of snow albedo feedbacks on climate change predicted by these models. To explore this uncertainty, three commonly used methods for calculating the albedo of vegetated surfaces are compared, taking observed snow and vegetation distributions as inputs. Surprisingly, all three methods produce similar results and compare reasonably well with observations over seasonally snow‐covered regions of the Northern Hemisphere. It appears that some climate models use unrealistic parameter values, and snow albedo masking need not be as large a source of uncertainty as it is in current climate projections.