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Assessing climate model sensitivity to prescribed deforested landscapes
Author(s) -
Pitman A. J.,
Durbidge T. B.,
HendersonSellers A.,
McGuffie K.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
international journal of climatology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.58
H-Index - 166
eISSN - 1097-0088
pISSN - 0899-8418
DOI - 10.1002/joc.3370130806
Subject(s) - deforestation (computer science) , environmental science , albedo (alchemy) , vegetation (pathology) , climatology , terrain , climate change , general circulation model , climate model , atmospheric sciences , physical geography , geography , geology , medicine , art , oceanography , cartography , pathology , performance art , computer science , art history , programming language
The results from a series of 3‐ to 6‐year simulations of the climatic impacts of tropical deforestation using a version of the NCAR Community Climate Model (CCM1–Oz) indicate considerable sensitivity to the specification of the vegetation and soil that replaces the tropical forest. The simulations, which encompass landscapes from forest, through grass with some trees, grass‐only, no vegetation with forest soils, to a devastated terrain, suggest that the predicted climate change depends about equally on at least three factors: (i) the global model and its large‐scale circulation sensitivity, (ii) the length of the model simulation, and (iii) the nature of the prescribed land‐use change, particularly the relative magnitudes of the changes (forested to deforested) in albedo and vegetation roughness length.