Impact of transient forest cover changes in historical and future scenario regional climate model simulations across Europe

Forests play a significant role in climate change adaptation and mitigation due to their ability to sequester carbon. They interact with atmospheric processes both biophysically and biogeochemically, influencing the exchange of energy, water, nutrients and carbon. Large-scale deforestation and afforestation significantly alter forest cover, a key factor in these processes. Understanding the effects and feedbacks of forest cover changes on regional and local climate is therefore essential. In regional climate model simulations, however, forest cover is often treated as static, ignoring both historical changes in recent decades, and projected changes in future scenarios. The LUCAS LUC dataset (Hoffmann et al., 2023) is a high-resolution dataset for regional climate modeling that incorporates land use and land cover changes (LULCC), including forest cover changes.  

Within the framework of the EU Horizon project OptFor-EU, the regional climate model systems RegCM5+CLM4.5 and REMO2020-iMOVE are employed, coupled to different land surface and vegetation modules. This setup enables the implementation of the LUCAS LUC dataset with transient LULCC. According to the experiment protocol of the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study LUCAS phase 2, we conduct reanalysis-driven evaluation simulations for the European continent at 12.5 km spatial resolution employing transient LULCC from the LUCAS LUC dataset and compare them to simulations employing the static land cover from LUCAS LUC 2015. We proceed with the same simulation setup but drive the simulations with the global Earth system model MPI-ESM-HR, for the historical period and the future SSP126 scenario, employing transient LULCC and static land cover. We analyze the impact of the implementation of transient LULCC compared to using the static land cover in simulations from the historical period (1976-2005) and future scenario (2021 – 2050), focusing on the impact of forest cover changes on land surface variables as well as on near-surface air temperature, and compare the different responses between both models.   

Reference  

Hoffmann, P., Reinhart, V., Rechid, D., de Noblet-Ducoudré, N., Davin, E. L., Asmus, C., Bechtel, B., Böhner, J., Katragkou, E., and Luyssaert, S.: High-resolution land use and land cover dataset for regional climate modelling: historical and future changes in Europe, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 3819–3852, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-3819-2023, 2023.