Soil frost-induced soil moisture precipitation feedback over high northern latitudes

• Main Authors: Hagemann, Stefan, Blome, Tanja, Ekici, Altug, Beer, Christian
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2016
• Subjects: Ice; permafrost; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-2016-5

Permafrost or perennially frozen ground is an important part of the terrestrial cryosphere; roughly one quarter of Earth's land surface is underlain by permafrost. The impact of the currently observed warming, which is projected to persist during the coming decades due to anthropogenic CO 2 input, certainly has effects for the vast permafrost areas of the high northern latitudes. The quantification of these effects, however, is scientifically still an open question. This is partly due to the complexity of the system, where several feedbacks are interacting between land and atmosphere, sometimes counterbalancing each other. Moreover, until recently, many global circulation models (GCMs) and Earth system models (ESMs) lacked the sufficient representation of cold region physical soil processes in their land surface schemes, especially of the effects of freezing and thawing of soil water for both energy and water cycles. Therefore, it will be analysed in the present study how these processes impact large-scale hydrology and climate over northern hemisphere high latitude land areas. For this analysis, the atmosphere-land part of MPI-ESM, ECHAM6-JSBACH, is driven by prescribed observed SST and sea ice in an AMIP2-type setup with and without newly implemented cold region soil processes. Results show a large improvement in the simulated discharge. On one hand this is related to an improved snowmelt peak of runoff due to frozen soil in spring. On the other hand a subsequent reduction of soil moisture leads to a positive land atmosphere feedback to precipitation over the high latitudes, which reduces the model’s wet biases in precipitation and evapotranspiration during the summer. This is noteworthy as soil moisture – atmosphere feedbacks have previously not been in the research focus over the high latitudes. These results point out the importance of high latitude physical processes at the land surface for the regional climate.