Tanja Stanelle

The Second Phase of the Global Land–Atmosphere Coupling Experiment: Soil Moisture Contributions to Subseasonal Forecast Skill

AbstractThe second phase of the Global Land–Atmosphere Coupling Experiment (GLACE-2) is a multi-institutional numerical modeling experiment focused on quantifying, for boreal summer, the subseasonal (out to two months) forecast skill for precipitation and air temperature that can be derived from the realistic initialization of land surface states, notably soil moisture. An overview of the experiment and model behavior at the global scale is described here, along with a determination and characterization of multimodel “consensus” skill. The models show modest but significant skill in predicting air temperatures, especially where the rain gauge network is dense. Given that precipitation is the chief driver of soil moisture, and thereby assuming that rain gauge density is a reasonable proxy for the adequacy of the observational network contributing to soil moisture initialization, this result indeed highlights the potential contribution of enhanced observations to prediction. Land-derived precipitation forec...

Anthropogenically induced changes in twentieth century mineral dust burden and the associated impact on radiative forcing

We investigate the relative importance of climate change (CC) and anthropogenic land cover change (ALCC) for the dust emissions and burden changes between the late nineteenth century and today. For this purpose, the climate-aerosol model ECHAM6-HAM2 is complemented by a new scheme to derive potential dust sources at runtime using the vegetation cover provided by the land component JSBACH of ECHAM6. Dust emissions are computed online using information from the ECHAM6 atmospheric component. This allows us to account for changes in land cover and climate interactively and to distinguish between emissions from natural and agricultural dust sources. For todays climate we find that nearly 10% of dust particles are emitted from agricultural areas. According to our simulations, global annual dust emissions have increased by 25% between the late nineteenth century and today (e.g., from 729 Tg/a to 912 Tg/a). Globally, CC and ALCC (e.g., agricultural expansion) have both contributed to this change (56% and 40%, respectively). There are however large regional differences. For example, change in dust emissions in Africa are clearly dominated by CC. Global dust burden have increased by 24.5% since the late nineteenth century, which results in a clear-sky radiative forcing at top of the atmosphere of −0.14 W/m2. Based on these findings, we recommend that both climate changes and anthropogenic land cover changes should be considered when investigating long-term changes in dust emissions.