Development of Historical and Future Land Cover and Land Use Change Datasets for the Community Climate System Model

University Of Kansas Center For Research Inc, Lawrence KS

Investigators

Abstract

This project will produce a comprehensive dataset to represent multiple time series of specific human activities that are known to have impacts on climate. Activities included are: human induced land cover change, agricultural change, irrigation practices, urbanization, and human induced soil degradation. By treating these activities independently the PI will isolate the impacts of each of them and also consider their integrated impacts. For each of the human impacts evaluated in this project, a time series dataset representing the spatial extent and severity of the human impact will be assessed for the time period 1750 to 2100. The datasets will be specifically constructed for use in the Community Climate System Model, but they are intended to become a public resource for scientists to use to implement land cover change experiments constant with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario guidelines. By using high-resolution data in creating the datasets the PI will make them easily scalable so they can be used at multiple model resolutions and by different modeling groups. There are potentially several broader impacts associated with this project: First, bringing together a number of disparate datasets and putting them in standardized time and spatial scales, will facilitate comparison of and access to human land cover information. Second, combining datasets of present day conditions with historical datasets and future scenarios of change (e.g. IPCC climate change scenarios) will provide researchers a common dataset for evaluating human impacts over time. This will allow for the creation of standardized climate model simulations and for inter-model comparison projects.