The Land Use Model Intercomparison Project (LUMIP) contribution to CMIP6: rationale and experimental design

Journal Article · Fri Sep 02 00:00:00 EDT 2016 · Geoscientific Model Development (Online)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-2973-2016· OSTI ID:1377473

Lawrence, David M. ^[1]; Hurtt, George C. ^[2]; Arneth, Almut ^[3]; Brovkin, Victor ^[4]; Calvin, Kate V. ^[5]; Jones, Andrew D. ^[6]; Jones, Chris D. ^[7]; Lawrence, Peter J. ^[1]; de Noblet-Ducoudré, Nathalie ^[8]; Pongratz, Julia ^[4]; Seneviratne, Sonia I. ^[8]; Shevliakova, Elena ^[9]

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1. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States)
2. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
3. Karlsruhe Inst. of Technology (KIT) (Germany)
4. Max Planck Society, Hamburg (Germany). Max Planck Inst. for Meteorology
5. Joint Global Change Research Institute, College Park, MD (United States)
6. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
7. Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter (United Kingdom)
8. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climate et de l'Environnement, Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
9. Princeton Univ., NJ (United States); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Washington, DC (United States)

Human land-use activities have resulted in large changes to the Earth's surface, with resulting implications for climate. In the future, land-use activities are likely to expand and intensify further to meet growing demands for food, fiber, and energy. The Land Use Model Intercomparison Project (LUMIP) aims to further advance understanding of the impacts of land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) on climate, specifically addressing the following questions. (1) What are the effects of LULCC on climate and biogeochemical cycling (past–future)? (2) What are the impacts of land management on surface fluxes of carbon, water, and energy, and are there regional land-management strategies with the promise to help mitigate 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 LULCC relative to all forcings, separation of biogeochemical from biogeophysical effects of land use, the unique impacts of land-cover change vs. land-management change, modulation of land-use impact on climate by land–atmosphere coupling strength, and the extent to which 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) development of an updated and expanded historical and future land-use data set, (2) an experimental protocol for specific LUMIP experiments for CMIP6, and (3) definition of metrics and diagnostic protocols that quantify model performance, and related sensitivities, with respect to LULCC. In this paper, we describe LUMIP activity (2), i.e., the LUMIP simulations that will formally be part of CMIP6. These experiments are explicitly designed to be complementary to simulations requested in the CMIP6 DECK and historical simulations and other CMIP6 MIPs including ScenarioMIP, C4MIP, LS3MIP, and DAMIP. LUMIP includes a two-phase experimental design. Phase one features idealized coupled and land-only model simulations designed to advance process-level understanding of LULCC impacts on climate, as well as to quantify model sensitivity to potential land-cover and land-use change. Phase two experiments focus on quantification of the historic impact of land use and the potential for future land management decisions to aid in mitigation of climate change. This paper documents these simulations in detail, explains their rationale, outlines plans for analysis, and describes a new subgrid land-use tile data request for selected variables (reporting model output data separately for primary and secondary land, crops, pasture, and urban land-use types). It is essential that modeling groups participating in LUMIP adhere to the experimental design as closely as possible and clearly report how the model experiments were executed.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231; FC03-97ER62402; SC0012972; AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1377473
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1406814
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-117132; ark:/13030/qt7cb2v1bb
• Journal Information: Geoscientific Model Development (Online), Vol. 9, Issue 9; ISSN 1991-9603
• Publisher: European Geosciences Union
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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