First assessment of continental energy storage in CMIP5 simulations

Cuesta‐Valero, Francisco José; García‐García, Almudena; Beltrami, Hugo; Smerdon, Jason E.

doi:10.1002/2016gl068496

Cited by 36 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…Because subsurface temperatures are a direct measure, which unlike proxy reconstructions of past climate do not need to be calibrated with the meteorological records, they provide an independent way of assessing changes in climate. Such records, are useful tools for evaluating climate simulations beyond the observational period (Beltrami et al, 2017;Cuesta-Valero et al, 2016García-García et al, 2016;González-Rouco et al, 2006Jaume-Santero et al, 2016;MacDougall et al, 2010;Stevens et al, 2008), as well as for assessing proxy data reconstructions (Beltrami et al, 2017;Jaume-Santero etl., 2016).…”

Section: Borehole Climatologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Nevertheless, all global estimates were performed nearly two decades ago. Since, those days, advances in borehole methodological techniques (e.g., Beltrami et al, 2015;Cuesta-Valero et al, 2016;Jaume-Santero et al, 2016), the availability of additional BTP measurements, and the possibility of assessing the continental heat fluxes in the context of the FluxNet measurements (Gentine et al, 2019) The first estimates of continental heat content used borehole temperature versus depth profile data.…”

Section: Land Heat Content Estimatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Heat stored in the Earth system: Where does the energy go? The GCOS Earth heat inventory team

Schuckmann¹,

Cheng²,

Palmer³

et al. 2020

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Abstract. Human-induced atmospheric composition changes cause a radiative imbalance at the top-of-atmosphere which is driving global warming. This Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) is a fundamental metric of climate change. Understanding the heat gain of the Earth system from this accumulated heat – and particularly how much and where the heat is distributed in the Earth system – is fundamental to understanding how this affects warming oceans, atmosphere and land, rising temperatures and sea level, and loss of grounded and floating ice, which are fundamental concerns for society. This study is a Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) concerted international effort to update the Earth heat inventory, and presents an updated international assessment of ocean warming estimates, and new and updated estimates of heat gain in the atmosphere, cryosphere and land over the period 1960–2018. The study obtains a consistent long-term Earth system heat gain over the past 58 years, with a total heat gain of 393 &pm; 40 ZJ, which is equivalent to a heating rate of 0.42 &pm; 0.04 W m−2. The majority of the heat gain (89 %) takes place in the global ocean (0–700 m: 53 %; 700–2000 m: 28 %; > 2000 m: 8 %), while it amounts to 6 % for the land heat gain, to 4 % available for the melting of grounded and floating ice, and to 1 % for atmospheric warming. These new estimates indicate a larger contribution of land and ice heat gain (10 % in total) compared to previous estimates (7 %). There is a regime shift of the Earth heat inventory over the past 2 decades, which appears to be predominantly driven by heat sequestration into the deeper layers of the global ocean, and a doubling of heat gain in the atmosphere. However, a major challenge is to reduce uncertainties in the Earth heat inventory, which can be best achieved through the maintenance of the current global climate observing system, its extension into areas of gaps in the sampling, as well as to establish an international framework for concerted multi-disciplinary research of the Earth heat inventory. Earth heat inventory is published at DKRZ (https://www.dkrz.de/) under the doi: https://doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/GCOS_EHI_EXP (von Schuckmann et al., 2020).

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Section: Borehole Climatologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Land Heat Content Estimatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heat stored in the Earth system: Where does the energy go? The GCOS Earth heat inventory team

Schuckmann¹,

Cheng²,

Palmer³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…These phenomena exert a strong socioeconomic impact on society, highlighting the importance of understanding air-ground coupling for assessments of the effect of climate change on these extremes (Seneviratne et al, 2006). Air-ground coupling has also been identified as a determinant factor for the evolution of temperature-dependent soil processes, such as changes in ground heat content (Cuesta-Valero et al, 2016) and permafrost and soil carbon stability (Koven et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterization of Air and Ground Temperature Relationships within the CMIP5 Historical and Future Climate Simulations

et al. 2019

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The relationships between air and ground surface temperatures across North America are examined in the historical and future projection simulations from 32 general circulation models (GCMs) included in the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). The difference between surface air (2 m) and ground surface (10 cm) temperatures is affected by simulated snow cover, vegetation cover, and precipitation by means of changes in soil moisture and soil properties. In winter, the differences between air and ground surface temperatures, for all CMIP5 simulations, are related to the insulating effect of snow cover and soil freezing phenomena. In summer, large leaf area index and large precipitation rates correspond to smaller differences between air and ground temperatures for the majority of simulations, likely due to induced changes in latent and sensible heat fluxes at the ground surface. Our results show that the representation of air‐ground coupling, analyzed using the difference between ground and air surface temperatures as metric, differs from observations, the North American Regional Reanalysis product and among the CMIP5 GCM simulations, by amounts that depend on the employed land surface model. The large variability among GCMs and the marked dependence of the results on the choice of the land surface model illustrate the need for improving the representation of processes controlling the coupling of the lower atmosphere and the land surface in GCMs as a mean of reducing the variability in their representation of weather and climate phenomena.

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“…Most of these land models rely on very shallow (∼3-42 m) subsurface modules (Cuesta-Valero et al, 2016). We expect that, both the thickness of the subsurface and setting a realistic non-zero value of heat flux as bottom boundary condition, will affect the evolution of permafrost in a warming scenario, and therefore the release of permafrost carbon.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lower boundary conditions in Land Surface Models. Effects on the permafrost and the carbon pools

Mendoza

Beltrami

MacDougall

et al. 2018

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Earth System Models (ESMs) use bottom boundaries for their land surface model components which are shallower than the depth reached by surface temperature changes in the centennial time scale associated with recent climate change. Shallow bottom boundaries reflect energy to the surface, which along with the lack of geothermal heat flux in current land surface models, alter the surface energy balance and therefore affect some feedback processes between the ground surface and the 5 atmosphere, such as permafrost and soil carbon stability. To evaluate these impacts, we modified the subsurface model in the Community Land Model version 4.5 (CLM4.5) by setting a non-zero crustal heat flux bottom boundary condition and by increasing the depth of the lower boundary by 300 m. The modified and original land models were run during the period 1901-2005 under the historical forcing and between 2005-2300 under two future scenarios of moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) emissions. Increasing the thickness of the subsurface by 300 m increases the heat stored in the subsurface by 72 ZJ 10(1 ZJ = 10 21 J) by year 2300 for the RCP 4.5 scenario and 201 ZJ for the RCP 8.5 scenario (respective increases of 260% and 217% relative to the shallow model), reduces the loss of near-surface permafrost between 1901 and 2300 by 1.6%-1.9%, and reduces the loss of soil carbon by 1.6%-3.6%. Each increase of 0.02 W m −2 of the crustal heat flux increases the temperature at the soil-bedrock frontier by 0.4 ± 0.01 K, which decreases near-surface permafrost area slightly (0.3-0.8%), but reduces the loss of soil carbon by as much as 1.1%-5.6% for the two scenarios. 15Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., https://doi.and snow cover (Hansen and Nazarenko, 2004). In these Land Surface Models (LSMs) the bedrock layer present below soil is impermeable, and when explicitly modeled, the only process taking place in bedrock is thermal diffusion.Thermal diffusion in the subsurface allows the land system to act like a heat reservoir, contributing to the thermal inertia of Earth's climate. However, this contribution is relatively small as the capacity of the oceans to absorb energy is orders of magnitude above that of the continents (Stocker et al., 2013). Estimates of the energy accumulation during the second half of 5 the 20th century in the land system show that the heat stored in continents (9 ± 1 ZJ, where 1 ZJ = 10 21 J) is less than the uncertainty on the heat stored in oceans during the same period (240±19 ZJ) (Beltrami et al., 2002;Levitus et al., 2012;Rhein et al., 2013). This justifies many ESMs to only consider the land subsurface to the shallow depth (3 − 4 m) needed for soil modeling (Schmidt et al., 2014;Wu et al., 2014) and neglect the bedrock entirely. Still, the thermal regime of the subsurface affects the energy balance at the surface, which in turn influences the surface and soil processes with a feedback on the climate 10 system. Energy variations at the land surface propagate underground, and the use of a too shallow subsurface in land models impl...

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First assessment of continental energy storage in CMIP5 simulations

Cited by 36 publications

References 66 publications

Heat stored in the Earth system: Where does the energy go? The GCOS Earth heat inventory team

Heat stored in the Earth system: Where does the energy go? The GCOS Earth heat inventory team

Characterization of Air and Ground Temperature Relationships within the CMIP5 Historical and Future Climate Simulations

Lower boundary conditions in Land Surface Models. Effects on the permafrost and the carbon pools

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