CPD

Climate of the Past Discussions

CPD

1814-9359

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/cpd-1-1-2005

Quantifying the effect of vegetation dynamics on the climate of the Last Glacial Maximum

Jahn

¹ ³ Claussen

¹ ² Ganopolski

¹ Brovkin

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), P.O. Box 601203, 14412 Potsdam, Germany

Institute of Physics, Potsdam University, P.O. Box 601543, 14415 Potsdam, Germany

now at: Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, McGill University, Burnside Hall Room 945, 805 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2K6, Canada

23 06 2005

1 1 1 16

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article is available from http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/1/1/2005/cpd-1-1-2005.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/1/1/2005/cpd-1-1-2005.pdf

The importance of the biogeophysical atmosphere-vegetation feedback in comparison with the radiative effect of lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the presence of ice sheets at the last glacial maximum (LGM) is investigated with the climate system model CLIMBER-2. Equilibrium experiments reveal that most of the global cooling at the LGM (−5.1°C) relative to present-day conditions is caused by the introduction of ice sheets into the model (−3.0°C, 59%), followed by the effect of lower atmospheric CO2 levels at the LGM (−1.5°C, 29%). The biogeophysical effects of changes in vegetation cover are found to cool the LGM climate by 0.6°C (12%). They are most pronounced in the northern high latitudes, where the taiga-tundra feedback causes annually averaged temperature changes of up to −2°C, while the radiative effect of lower atmospheric CO2 in this region only produces a cooling of 1.5°C. Hence, in this region, the temperature changes caused by vegetation dynamics at the LGM exceed the cooling due to lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations.