Vegetation Dynamics Enhancing Long-Term Climate Variability Confirmed by Two Models

Two different coupled climate–vegetation models, the Community Climate Model version 3 coupled to the Integrated Biosphere Simulator (CCM3–IBIS) and the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique’s climate model coupled to the Organizing Carbon and Hydrology in Dynamic Ecosystems model (LMDz–ORCHIDEE), are used to study the effects of vegetation dynamics on climate variability. Two sets of simulations of the preindustrial climate are performed using fixed climatological sea surface temperatures: one set taking into account vegetation cover dynamics and the other keeping the vegetation cover fixed. Spectral analysis of the simulated precipitation and temperature over land shows that for both models the interactions between vegetation dynamics and the atmosphere enhance the low-frequency variability of the biosphere–atmosphere system at time scales ranging from a few years to a century. Despite differences in the magnitude of the signal between the two models, this confirms that vegetation dynamics introduces a long-term memory into the climate system by slowly modifying the physical characteristics of the land surface (albedo, roughness evapotranspiration). Unrealistic modeled feedbacks between the vegetation and the atmosphere would cast doubts on this result. The simulated feedback processes in the models used in this work are compared to the observed using a recently developed statistical approach. The models simulate feedbacks of the right sign and order of magnitude over large regions of the globe: positive temperature feedback in the mid- to high latitudes, negative feedback in semiarid regions, and positive precipitation feedback in semiarid regions. The models disagree in the tropics, where there is no statistical significance in the observations. The realistic modeled vegetation–atmosphere feedback gives us confidence that the vegetation dynamics enhancement of the long-term climate variability is not a model artifact.