Climate change detection over different land surface vegetation classes

• Main Author: Dang, Hongyan
• Other Authors: Weaver, Andrew
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: climate change; global warming; UVic Subject Index::Sciences and Engineering::Earth and Ocean Sciences; Greenland; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/1775

Biosystem variations may occur as a consequence of climate change. Analysis of both modern and paleo-proxy climate data indicates several places on Earth that show biosytem variations possibly resulting from changes in climate. In this thesis, a global land cover classification data set is used to partition the globe into seven re¬gions to study surface temperature changes over different vegetation/surface classes. Statistically significant warming is found from the year 1900 over all regions (except for the ice sheets over Greenland and Antarctica). Outputs from three coupled cli¬mate models (CGCM2, HadCM2 and Parallel Climate Model) are then adopted to examine the detection and attribution of surface temperature trends over the vari¬ous vegetation classes for the past half century. An anthropogenic warming trend is detected in six of the seven regions, which means that anthropogenic activities may have caused detectable influences in the regional surface temperature changes of the past half century. Observed trends are consistent with those simulated in response to greenhouse gas and sulphate aerosol forcing except over tropical forest and water where the models overestimate the warming. The similarity between the resultant scaling factors for each region from the different models underscores the reliability of our detection results.