Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.5194/esd-15-547-2024
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) First comprehensive assessment of industrial-era land heat uptake from multiple sources
Author García-Pereira, F.; González-Rouco, J.F.; Melo-Aguilar, C.; Steinert, N.J.; García-Bustamante, E.; de Vrese, P.; Jungclaus, J.; Lorenz, S.; Hagemann, S.; Cuesta-Valero, F.J.; García-García, A. ORCID logo ; Beltrami, H.
Source Titel Earth System Dynamics
Year 2024
Department RS
Volume 15
Issue 3
Page From 547
Page To 564
Language englisch
Topic T5 Future Landscapes
Data and Software links https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10364950
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10371439
Abstract The anthropogenically intensified greenhouse effect has caused a radiative imbalance at the top of the atmosphere during the industrial period. This, in turn, has led to an energy surplus in various components of the Earth system, with the ocean storing the largest part. The land contribution ranks second with the latest observational estimates based on borehole temperature profiles, which quantify the terrestrial energy surplus to be 6 % in the last 5 decades, whereas studies based on state-of-the-art climate models scale it down to 2 %. This underestimation stems from land surface models (LSMs) having a subsurface that is too shallow, which severely constrains the land heat uptake simulated by Earth system models (ESMs). A forced simulation of the last 2000 years with the Max Planck Institute ESM (MPI-ESM) using a deep LSM captures 4 times more heat than the standard shallow MPI-ESM simulations in the historical period, well above the estimates provided by other ESMs. However, deepening the LSM does not remarkably affect the simulated surface temperature. It is shown that the heat stored during the historical period by an ESM using a deep LSM component can be accurately estimated by considering the surface temperatures simulated by the ESM using a shallow LSM and propagating them with a standalone forward model. This result is used to derive estimates of land heat uptake using all available observational datasets, reanalysis products, and state-of-the-art ESM experiments. This approach yields values of 10.5–16.0 ZJ for 1971–2018, which are 12 %–42 % smaller than the latest borehole-based estimates (18.2 ZJ).
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=29224
García-Pereira, F., González-Rouco, J.F., Melo-Aguilar, C., Steinert, N.J., García-Bustamante, E., de Vrese, P., Jungclaus, J., Lorenz, S., Hagemann, S., Cuesta-Valero, F.J., García-García, A., Beltrami, H. (2024):
First comprehensive assessment of industrial-era land heat uptake from multiple sources
Earth Syst. Dynam. 15 (3), 547 - 564 10.5194/esd-15-547-2024