Land Use Change Recycling Emulator (LURE)

Start date: 1 May 2024
End date: 30 April 2027
Funder: CSSP MetOffice
Value: £390,000
Partners and collaborators: CEH Wallingford, University of Exeter, Universidade de Santa Catarina, INPE São José dos Campos
Primary investigator: Professor Emanuel Gloor
External co-investigators: Stephen Sitch, Chris Huntingford, Marina Hirota, Celso von Randow, Ana Paula Aguiar
Postgraduate students: Luis Cattelan

Grahics showing temperature variables

Global tropical forest area has decreased strongly over the past decades (e.g. Amazonia ~ 20 %). Remaining tropical forests are under major threat from many pressures. These include forest fires, land grab and land conversion for crops and pasture, logging for timber production, forest destruction as a result of resource acquisition, change of forest habitats because of dam construction for hydropower production, and on top of these threats an increasingly hotter and erratic climate with precipitation regimes shifting.

The ongoing destruction of forests adds to changes of climate at local to continental scales. For example, deforestation leads to increased surface temperatures, to a decrease in evapotranspiration (and associated decrease in evaporative cooling) and precipitation. Deforestation causes also a decrease in surface roughness, thus a decrease in the coupling between the land surface and lower troposphere resulting in a decrease in 'energy redistribution' from the land surface to the lower troposphere.

Earth system models can be used to simulate the effect of novel emission scenarios on climate and how newly modelled land processes may evolve in a changing climate. However running these models is very costly. Instead earth system model emulators like IMOGEN/PRIME and FAIR have been developed and used extensively e.g. at COP (Climate) meetings to examine emissions/land use pathways. An on-going criticism of these emulators is that they do not capture local or regional land-atmosphere feedbacks related to changed land description (IMOGEN/PRIME does, however, capture global CO2 feedbacks where alterations to the terrestrial carbon stores can adjust atmospheric carbon dioxide levels).

The purpose of the LURE project is to develop an efficient way using precipitation tracking models and a range of new land use / land cover change scenarios to include the effect on land use in the UK Met Office earth system model simulator IMOGEN/PRIME for efficient and comprehensive climate change predictions.

Impact

Better understanding of questions like deforestation induced climate change and reversibility of land cover change.