Climate Impacts of vegetation biophysical feedbacks for the past three decades

Abstract

Vegetation biophysical feedbacks are well known for the extreme “cases” of land cover change. In general, previous studies indicated that tropical afforestation attenuates warming through increasing evapotranspiration, while boreal afforestation exacerbates warming through decreasing albedo. We can hypothesize that the enhanced vegetation growth in boreal regions will induce a warming, jus as afforestation does. Evidences from remote sensing products show that the Earth is becoming greener during the past three decades. Biophysical feedbacks caused by LAI trends should be less extreme and more widespread than those extreme land cover change cases, have not been quantified to date. We designed and conducted the ensemble simulations with ACME land-atmosphere coupled mode to investigate the responses of climate to changes in LAI during the last 30 years.