From land use to land cover: restoring the afforestation signal in a coupled integrated assessment–earth system model and the implications for CMIP5 RCP simulations

Di Vittorio, A. V.; Chini, L. P.; Bond-Lamberty, B.; Mao, J.; Shi, X.; Truesdale, J.; Craig, A.; Calvin, K.; Jones, A.; Collins, W. D.; Edmonds, J.; Hurtt, G. C.; Thornton, P.; Thomson, A.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-11-6435-2014

Articles | Volume 11, issue 22

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-11-6435-2014

© Author(s) 2014. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-11-6435-2014

© Author(s) 2014. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 22

Research article

|

27 Nov 2014

Research article |

| 27 Nov 2014

From land use to land cover: restoring the afforestation signal in a coupled integrated assessment–earth system model and the implications for CMIP5 RCP simulations

A. V. Di Vittorio, L. P. Chini, B. Bond-Lamberty, J. Mao, X. Shi, J. Truesdale, A. Craig, K. Calvin, A. Jones, W. D. Collins, J. Edmonds, G. C. Hurtt, P. Thornton, and A. Thomson

Download

Final revised paper (published on 27 Nov 2014)
Preprint (discussion started on 19 May 2014)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC C2671: 'Simple message made confusing', Anonymous Referee #1, 19 Jun 2014
- AC C4168: 'We agree that there is a simple message, but the issue is much more complicated than the simple message implies.', Alan Di Vittorio, 07 Aug 2014
RC C3782: 'Review of From land use to land cover: Restoring the afforestation signal in a coupled integrated assessment - earth system model and the implications for CMIP5 RCP simulations', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 Jul 2014
- AC C4177: 'Both reviews are extremely helpful for us to more clearly present our case for a more consistent and complete land coupling between IAMs and ESMs for robust scenario-based simulations of global carbon and climate.', Alan Di Vittorio, 07 Aug 2014

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Alan Di Vittorio on behalf of the Authors (04 Sep 2014) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (12 Oct 2014) by Victor Brovkin

Dear Dr. Di Vittorio,

you have answered reviewers concerns in a satisfactory manner and I would be pleased to accept your paper for publication after you consider the comments listed below.

Yours sincerely,

Victor Brovkin

--

Please reconsider whether you need the Figure 1. The status of implementation is just a reflection of a current state, which will change in few months. I think it does belong to a proposal, but not to the peer-review paper.

Figure 4: “When cropland and pasture increase, tree PFTs are removed first,
then other non-crop PFTs, in proportion to reference year fractions…” I understand that this is a key difference of your new land use translator to its old version, but want to share our experience with preferential removal of PFTs due to land use. We have implemented both dynamic vegetation and landuse change into JSBACH (Reick et al., JAMES, 2013). Recently, we encountered a problem that preferential removal of grass for pastures (so-called “pasture rule”) leads to unintentional decrease in tree cover because dynamic vegetation module tries to re-establish a balance between natural tree and grass cover in the undisturbed grid cell fraction. This has a pronounced effect on the land carbon budget. If I understand correctly, the current CESM setup does not allow simultaneous simulation of dynamic vegetation and landuse, so you are not running in the same sort of problem in the given study. Therefore, no change in the manuscript is needed, but it might be useful to consider this issue in the future.

Figure 8: please add units to the color legend

l. 420: 4.36 km2 (million km2?)

l.647-648: please check with G. Hurtt whether LUMIP was accepted as CMIP6 project at the WGCM/WCRP meeting last week

Hide

AR by Alan Di Vittorio on behalf of the Authors (15 Oct 2014) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (17 Oct 2014) by Victor Brovkin

AR by Alan Di Vittorio on behalf of the Authors (17 Oct 2014)

Short summary

Economic models provide scenarios of land use and greenhouse gas emissions to earth system models to project global change. We found, and partially addressed, inconsistencies in land cover between an economic and an earth system model that effectively alter a prescribed scenario, causing significant differences in projected terrestrial carbon and atmospheric CO2 between prescribed and altered scenarios. We outline a solution to this current problem in scenario-based global change projections.