Climate of the Past Discussions
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2009
10.5194/cpd-5-29-2009
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/5/29/2009/
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/5/29/2009/cpd-5-29-2009.html
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/5/29/2009/cpd-5-29-2009.pdf
29
71
2009-01-08
Impacts of land surface properties and atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> on the Last Glacial Maximum climate: a factor separation analysis
A.-J. Henrot
alexandra.henrot@ulg.ac.be
L. François
S. Brewer
G. Munhoven
Laboratory of Atmospheric and Planetary Physics, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
Unité de Modélisation du Climat et des Cycles Biogéochimiques, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
now at: Botany Department, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA
Many sensitivity studies have been carried out, using simplified GCMs to test
the climate response to Last Glacial Maximum boundary conditions. Here,
instead of adding the forcings successively as in previous studies, we
applied the separation method of Stein and Alpert (1993), in order to
determine rigourously the different contributions of the boundary condition
modifications, and isolate the pure contributions from the interactions among
the forcings. We carried out a series of sensitivity experiments with the
model of intermediate complexity Planet Simulator, investigating the
contributions of the ice sheet expansion and elevation, the lowering of the
atmospheric CO<sub>2</sub> and of the vegetation cover change on the LGM
climate. The results clearly identify the ice cover forcing as the main
contributor to the cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, and also to the
tropical precipitation disruption, leading to the shouthward shift of the
ITCZ, while the orographic forcing mainly contributes to the disruption of
the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere. The isolated
vegetation contribution also induces strong cooling over the continents of
the Northern Hemisphere, that is further sufficient to affect the tropical
precipitation and reinforce the southwards shift of the ITCZ, when combined
with the ice forcing. The combinations of the forcings generate many non
linear interactions, that reinforce or weaken the pure contributions,
depending on the climatic mechanism involved, but they are generally weaker
than the pure contributions. Finally, the comparison between the LGM
simulated climate and climatic reconstructions over Eurasia suggests that our
results reproduce well the south-west to north-east temperature gradients
over Eurasia.
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