Several multi-decadal simulations have been carried out with the new version of the CCSM climate model. This paper reports an analysis of the land component of these simulations. Global annual averages over land appear to be within the uncertainty of observational data sets but the seasonal cycle over land of temperature and precipitation appear too weak. These departures from observations appe...

Daily precipitation data from worldwide stations and gridded analyses and from 18 coupled global climate models are used to evaluate the models’ performance in simulating the precipitation frequency, intensity, and the number of rainy days contributing to most (i.e., 67%) of the annual precipitation total. Although the models examined here are able to simulate the land precipitation amount well...

There is considerable interest in understanding the fate of the Amazon over the coming century in the face of climate change, rising atmospheric CO2 levels, ongoing land transformation, and changing fire regimes within the region. In this analysis, we explore the fate of Amazonian ecosystems under the combined impact of these four environmental forcings using three terrestrial biosphere models ...

The ability to simulate regional precipitation realistically by climate models is essential to understand and adapt to climate change. Due to the complexity of associated processes, particularly at unresolved temporal and spatial scales this continues to be a major challenge. As a result, climate simulations of precipitation often exhibit substantial biases that affect the reliability of future...

[1] We perform two 23 year simulations using a regional climate model coupled with the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Land Model version 3.5 (RegCM‐CLM) to investigate land‐atmosphere coupling in the continental United States during the cold season (October–April) and the role of soil water phase. One simulation allows the land surface to interact freely (RunI) while the oth...

NOVEMBER 2004 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | T he southwestern United States exhibits considerable interannual and interdecadal variability in climate (Sheppard et al. 2002), with over tenfold differences in winter precipitation from year to year.1 Summer monsoons and winter storms create a bimodal precipitation pattern. Winter precipitation is particularly important, because it provides muc...

Climate change projections anticipate increased frequency and intensity of drought stress, but grassland responses to severe droughts and their potential to recover are poorly understood. In many grasslands, high land-use intensity has enhanced productivity and promoted resource-acquisitive species at the expense of resource-conservative ones. Such changes in plant functional composition could ...

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China has experienced significant land cover and climate change since the beginning of the 21st century. However, a reasonable simulation of evapotranspiration (ET) and its response to environmental factors are still unclear. For this study, to simulate ET and its response to climate and land cover change in Xinjiang, China from 2001 to 2012, we used the...

[1] We assessed the effects of historical (1931–1998) changes in both land use and climate on the water budget of a rapidly urbanizing watershed, Ipswich River basin (IRB), in northeastern Massachusetts. Water diversions and extremely low flow during summer are major issues in the IRB. Our study centers on a detailed analysis of diversions and a combined empirical/modeling treatment of evapotra...

Numerous climate change effects on biodiversity have been anticipated and documented, including extinctions, range shifts, phenological shifts, and breakdown of interactions in ecological communities, yet the relative balance of different climate drivers and their relationships to other agents of global change (for example, land use and land-use change) remains relatively poorly understood. Thi...