PNNL

Abstract

Human land-use activities have resulted in large changes to the Earth surface, with resulting implications for climate. In the future, land-use activities are likely to expand and/or intensify further to meet growing demands for food, fiber, and energy. The Land-Use Model Intercomparison Project (LUMIP) aims to further advance our understanding of the impacts of land-use and land cover change (LULCC) on climate specifically addressing the questions: (1) What are the effects of land use and land-use change on climate and biogeochemical cycling (past-future)? (2) Are there regional land management strategies with promise to help mitigate and/or adapt to climate change? In addressing these questions, LUMIP will also address a range of more detailed science questions to get at process level attribution, uncertainty, data requirements, and other related issues in more depth and sophistication than possible in a multi-model context to date. There will be particular focus on the separation and quantification of the effects on climate from land-use change relative to fossil fuel emissions, separation of biogeochemical from biogeophysical effects of land-use, the unique impacts of land cover change versus land management change, modulation of land use impact on climate by land-atmosphere coupling strength, and the extent that the impacts of enhanced CO2 concentrations on plant photosynthesis are modulated by past and future land use. LUMIP involves three major sets of science activities: (1) a set of metrics and diagnostic protocols will be developed to quantify model performance, and related sensitivities, with respect to land use; (2) dataset; (3) define an experimental protocol for specific LUMIP experiments for CMIP6. In this paper, we describe the LUMIP simulations that will formally be part of CMIP6. These experiments are explicitly designed to be complementary to experiments from the CMIP core, ScenarioMIP, and C4MIP. LUMIP includes a two-phase experimental design. Phase one features idealized coupled and land-only model experiments designed to advance our process-level understanding of LULCC impacts on climate, as well as to quantify model sensitivity to potential land cover and land use changes. Phase two experiments will focus on the quantification of the historic impact of land use and the potential for future land management decisions to aid in the mitigation of climate change. This paper documents these simulations in detail, explains their rationale, outlines plans for analysis, and describes a new subgrid tile (primary and secondary land, crops, pasture, urban) data request. It is essential that modeling groups participating in LUMIP adhere to the experimental design as closely as possible.