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Nonlocal Effects Dominate the Global Mean Surface Temperature Response to the Biogeophysical Effects of Deforestation
Author(s) -
Winckler Johannes,
Lejeune Quentin,
Reick Christian H.,
Pongratz Julia
Publication year - 2019
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 - 10.1029/2018gl080211
Subject(s) - deforestation (computer science) , climate model , environmental science , global warming , climate change , climatology , range (aeronautics) , global cooling , atmospheric sciences , geology , computer science , materials science , programming language , oceanography , composite material
Abstract Deforestation influences surface temperature locally (“local effects”), but also at neighboring or remote regions (“nonlocal effects”). Observations indicate that local effects induce a warming in most locations, while many climate models show a global mean cooling when simulating global deforestation. We show that a nonlocal cooling in models, which is excluded from observations, may strongly contribute to these conflicting results. For the MPI‐ESM, the globally averaged nonlocal cooling exceeds the globally averaged local warming by a factor of three, for global deforestation but also for realistic areal extents and spatial distributions of deforestation. Furthermore, the globally averaged nonlocal effects dominate the local effects in realistic scenarios across a range of climate models. We conclude that observations alone are not sufficient to capture the full biogeophysical effects, and climate models are needed to better understand and quantify the full effects of deforestation before they are considered in strategies for climate mitigation.