Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) precipitation prediction in boreal spring and summer months, which contains a significant number of high-signal events, is scientifically challenging and prediction skill has remained poor for years. Tibetan Plateau (TP) spring observed surface temperatures show a lag correlation with summer precipitation in several remote regions, but current global land-atmosphere coupled models are unable to represent this behavior due to significant errors in producing observed TP surface temperatures. To address these issues, the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) program launched the “Impact of Initialized Land Surface Temperature and Snowpack on Subseasonal-to-Seasonal Prediction” (LS4P) initiative as a community effort to test the impact of land temperature in high mountain regions on S2S prediction by climate models: more than 40 institutions worldwide are participating in this project. After using an innovative new land state initialization approach based on observed surface 2-meter temperature over the TP in the LS4P experiment, results from a multi-model ensemble provide evidence for a causal relationship in the observed association between the Plateau spring land temperature and summer precipitation over several regions across the world through teleconnections. The influence is underscored by an out-of-phase oscillation between the TP and Rocky Mountain surface temperatures. This study reveals for the first time that high mountain land temperature could be a substantial source of S2S precipitation predictability, and its effect is probably as large as ocean surface temperature over global “hot spot” regions identified here; the ensemble means in some “hot spots” produce more than 40% of the observed anomalies. This LS4P approach should stimulate more follow-on explorations.

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The community land model version 4.5 provides two ways for treating the vegetation cover changes (a static versus an interactive) and two runoff schemes for tracking the soil moisture changes. In this study, we examined the sensitivity of the simulated boreal summer potential evapotranspiration (PET) to the aforementioned options using a regional climate model. Three different experiments with each one covering 16 years have been performed. The two runoff schemes were designated as SIMTOP (TOP) and variable infiltration capacity (VIC). Both runoff schemes were coupled to the carbon–nitrogen (CN) module, thus the vegetation status can be influenced by soil moisture changes. Results show that vegetation cover changes alone affect considerably the simulated 2-m mean air temperature (T2M). However, they do not affect the global incident solar radiation (RSDS) and PET. Conversely to the vegetation cover changes alone, the vegetation-runoff systems affect both the T2M and RSDS. Therefore, they considerably affect the simulated PET. Also, the CN-VIC overestimates the PET more than the CN-TOP compared to the Climatic Research Unit observational dataset. In comparison with the static vegetation case and CN-VIC, the CN-TOP shows the least bias of the simulated PET. Overall, our results show that the vegetation-runoff system is relevant in constraining the PET, though the CN-TOP can be recommended for future studies concerning the PET of tropical Africa.

The difficulties of using sulphuric acid for removing the physical dormancy of Faidherbia albida seeds have resulted in a search for alternative methods of pretreatment of the seeds. This trial tested the efffciency of I 0 alternative pretreatments. The results show that the sulphuric acid, manual scarification and scarification by hot wire, which achieved stable values of over 90% of germination of seeds after eight days, were clearly superior to the use of a seed gun (80% germination after 16 days at the optimal setting of the gun) or of hot/boiling water methods (less than 20% germination after 16 days). Due to the high capacity of seed gun (i.e. around I kg/minute), it appears that the gun method, although methods which treat seeds individually result in higher germination percentages, could be a useful way to treat large quantities of seeds. However, the optimal speed of the rotation of the gun must be determined beforehand for each lot of seeds.

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