The Capacity of Forests to Protect Regional Climate Under Global Warming

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This project will evaluate the impact of forest cover change on biogeophysical climate processes and feedbacks under global warming in northern Australia and Southeast Asia during the 21st century. The project will focus on the biogeophysical role of forests in the energy and water cycle, and their capacity to regulate the regional climate, which is widely accepted as an important oversight because forests enhance moisture recycling, cloud formation and precipitation processes, which stabilise climate and influence weather. Our approach is to move away from idealised scenario sensitivity modelling with global coarse-resolution (~200 km) climate models to high-resolution (15 km) modelling and evaluation of regional-scale impacts of land-use change on the near-surface climate (e.g. temperature, wind speed, evapotranspiration and soil moisture) and associated atmospheric processes (moisture recycling, precipitation and cloud formation). We will also evaluate the capacity of forests to reduce the severity, frequency and duration of droughts, intensity of rainfall, heatwaves, heat stress and severe storms. We will complete an ensemble of simulations over the Southeast Asia and northern Australia regions (32oN – 32oS; 91oE – 155oE) using the CSIRO's Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM) coupled to the CSIRO Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) model Version 2.2.3. The simulations are composed by two sets of experiments of varying land use scenarios. The first set will test the historical (period 1980-2015) role of deforestation on the regional climate where we will run CCAM/CABLE using the forest cover of year 1980 and 2015 (35 years for each land use scenario, a total of 70 years). The second set will test three forest cover change scenarios impacts on the future climate under different warming representative pathways or scenarios (so named RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). We will test the change in the surface climate under a forest restoration and business as usual scenarios. Each forest cover scenario will be run from 2015 to 2060 (46 years for each land use scenario, a total of 92 running years).