Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Lisa C. Sloan

Global climate sensitivity to land surface change: The Mid Holocene revisited

Geophysical Research Letters, 29(10), 1476, 10.1029/2002GL014880, 2002. 

Land surface forcing of global climate has been shown both for anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic changes in land surface distribution. Because validation of global climate models (GCMs) is dependent upon the use of accurate boundary conditions, and because changes in land surface distribution have been shown to have effects on climate in areas remote from those changes, we have tested the sensitivity of a GCM to a global Mid Holocene vegetation distribution reconstructed from the fossil record, a first for a 6 ka GCM run. Here we demonstrate that large areas of the globe show statistically significant temperature sensitivity to these land surface changes and that the magnitude of the vegetation forcing is equal to the magnitude of 6 ka orbital forcing, emphasizing the importance of accurate land surface distribution for both model validation and future climate prediction.