A Global Land System Framework for Integrated Climate-Change Assessments

Abstract in HTML and technical report in PDF available on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://mit.edu/globalchange/www/).Land ecosystems play a major role in the global cycles of energy, water, carbon and nutrients. A Global Land System (GLS) framework has been developed for the Integrated Global Systems Model Version 2 (IGSM2) to simulate the coupled biogeophysics and biogeochemistry of these ecosystems, as well as the interactions of these terrestrial processes with the climate system. The GLS framework has resolved a number of water and energy cycling deficiencies and inconsistencies introduced in IGSM1. In addition, a new representation of global land cover and classification as well as soil characteristics has been employed that ensures a consistent description of the global land surface amongst all the land components of the IGSM2. Under this new land cover classification system, GLS is run for a mosaic of land cover types within a latitudinal band defined by the IGSM2 atmosphere dynamics and chemistry sub-model. The GLS shows notable improvements in the representation of land fluxes and states of water and energy over the previous treatment of land processes in the IGSM1. In addition, the zonal features of simulated carbon fluxes as well as key trace gas emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are comparable to estimates based on higher resolution models constrained by observed climate forcing. Given this, the GLS framework represents a key advance in the ability of the IGSM to faithfully represent coupled terrestrial processes to the climate system, and is well poised to support more robust two-way feedbacks of natural and managed hydrologic and ecologic systems with the climate and socio-economic components of the IGSM2.This study received support from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is funded by a consortium of government, industry and foundation sponsors