Climate modelling

Regional climate model (RCM) is an important tool to assess the impact of land surface changes on climate. Due to the relatively higher resolution compared to General circulation models (GCMs), RCM can better represent climate extremes induced by land surface heterogeneity, which can in turn affect regional climate. In my research, I employ a coupled vegetation-climate RCM to assess the role of the terrestrial ecosystem on regional climate.

Fig. 1. Mechanisms resulting in the remote effects of the biophysical feedback on African rainfall. “(+)” and “(-)” signify increases and decreases, respectively (see Wu et al., 2016).

The related regional climate modelling studies include:

  • Vegetation feedback on African climate (Wu et al., 2016)

  • Vegetation feedback on South American climate (Wu et al., 2017; 2021)

  • Scale-dependency studies (RCA, HCLM, Wu et al., 2020)

  • The investigation of the convection-permitting model in simulating tropical rainfall (HCLM, Belušić et al., 2020; Lipzig et al., 2022)

References

Lipzig et al., 2022. ‘Representation of precipitation and top-of-atmosphere radiation in a multi-model convection-permitting ensemble for the Lake Victoria Basin (East-Africa)’.

Wu et al., 2021. Vegetation‐climate feedbacks enhance spatial heterogeneity of pan‐amazonian ecosystem states under climate change. GRL: doi/10.1029/2020GL092001

Wu, M., et al., 2020. The impact of regional climate model formulation and resolution on simulated precipitation in Africa, ESD, 11, 377–394, 2020, 10.5194/esd-11-377-2020

Belušić, D., de Vries, H., Dobler, A., Landgren, O., Lind, P., Lindstedt, D., Pedersen, R. A., Sánchez-Perrino, J. C., Toivonen, E., van Ulft, B., Wang, F., Andrae, U., Batrak, Y., Kjellström, E., Lenderink, G., Nikulin, G., Pietikäinen, J.-P., Rodríguez-Camino, E., Samuelsson, P., van Meijgaard, E., and Wu, M. 2020. ‘HCLIM38: a flexible regional climate model applicable for different climate zones from coarse to convection-permitting scales’, Geosci. Model Dev., 13, 1311–1333, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-1311-2020

Wu, M. et al., 2017. Impacts of land use on climate and ecosystem productivity over the Amazon and the South American continent. ERL: doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6fd6

Wu, M. et al., 2016. Vegetation–climate feedbacks modulate rainfall patterns in Africa under future climate change' ESD, 7, 627-647. doi:10.5194/esd-7-627-2016