Tropical climate and vegetation simulations during the Heinrich event 1 using an Earth System Model of Intermediate Complexity (EMIC) - the University of Victoria Earth System-Climate Model (UVic ESCM)


Autoria(s): Handiani, Dian Noor; Paul, André; Dupont, Lydie M
Data(s)

08/01/2013

Resumo

Abrupt climate changes from 18 to 15 thousand years before present (kyr BP) associated with Heinrich Event 1 (HE1) had a strong impact on vegetation patterns not only at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, but also in the tropical regions around the Atlantic Ocean. To gain a better understanding of the linkage between high and low latitudes, we used the University of Victoria (UVic) Earth System-Climate Model (ESCM) with dynamical vegetation and land surface components to simulate four scenarios of climate-vegetation interaction: the pre-industrial era, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and a Heinrich-like event with two different climate backgrounds (interglacial and glacial). We calculated mega-biomes from the plant-functional types (PFTs) generated by the model to allow for a direct comparison between model results and palynological vegetation reconstructions. Our calculated mega-biomes for the pre-industrial period and the LGM corresponded well with biome reconstructions of the modern and LGM time slices, respectively, except that our pre-industrial simulation predicted the dominance of grassland in southern Europe and our LGM simulation resulted in more forest cover in tropical and sub-tropical South America. The HE1-like simulation with a glacial climate background produced sea-surface temperature patterns and enhanced inter-hemispheric thermal gradients in accordance with the "bipolar seesaw" hypothesis. We found that the cooling of the Northern Hemisphere caused a southward shift of those PFTs that are indicative of an increased desertification and a retreat of broadleaf forests in West Africa and northern South America. The mega-biomes from our HE1 simulation agreed well with paleovegetation data from tropical Africa and northern South America. Thus, according to our model-data comparison, the reconstructed vegetation changes for the tropical regions around the Atlantic Ocean were physically consistent with the remote effects of a Heinrich event under a glacial climate background.

Formato

text/tab-separated-values, 55 data points

Identificador

https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.804876

doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.804876

Idioma(s)

en

Publicador

PANGAEA

Relação

Description of: Filenames, parameters, unit, level and filetype (URI: hdl:10013/epic.40586.d001)

Direitos

CC-BY: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported

Access constraints: unrestricted

Fonte

Supplement to: Handiani, Dian Noor; Paul, André; Dupont, Lydie M (2012): Tropical climate and vegetation changes during Heinrich Event 1: a model-data comparison. Climate of the Past, 8(1), 37-57, doi:10.5194/cp-8-37-2012

Palavras-Chave #Description; File name; File size; File type; Uniform resource locator/link to model result file
Tipo

Dataset