Long-term high-resolution land-use/land-cover change dataset for regional climate modeling

Abstract:

Land-use and land cover (LULC) are continuously changing due to environmental changes and anthropogenic activities. The bio-physical impacts of these changes on the regional climate in Europe are currently extensively investigated within the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study LUCAS - "Land Use and Climate Across Scales" using an ensemble of different regional climate models (RCMs) coupled with land surface models (LSMs). To investigate the impact of realistic LULC changes, observed historic LULC changes and plausible future LULCC scenarios are required as input for the RCM-LSM simulations. Therefore, the land-use change information from the land-use harmonized dataset (LUH2), provided at 0.25° resolution as input for CMIP6 experiments, is applied to derive realistic LULC distributions on high spatial resolution and annual timestep from 1950 to 2100. The basemap is constructed using the current LULC distribution (~300 m) derived from the ESA-CCI LC dataset. The LULC classes from the ESA-CCI are converted into a map of 16 plant functional types (PFTs) using observed climate data (i.e. biotemperature and precipitation) in combination with the Holdridge ecosystem classification scheme. A new land use translator (LUT) specific to the needs of RCMs is developed to convert the land use change information provided by the LUH2 dataset into changes in the PFT distribution. The annual PFT maps for Europe for the period 1950 to 2015 are derived from historical LUH2 dataset by applying the LUT backward from 2015 to 1950. From 2016 onwards, annual maps for future scenarios based on LUH2 are derived for different SSP/RCP combinations. The resulting LULC datasets can be applied as land surface forcing to the LUCAS RCM-LSM ensemble as well as the EURO-CORDEX community to investigate the impact of both past and future LULC changes on high resolution climate change simulations.