This study evaluated GCMs for common drought metrics during the past 55 years. It found different models can produce very different simulations of drought, depending on the type of drought and metric analysed. The study points to a need to improve GCMs for droughts to reduce uncertainties in future projections.
CLEX researchers writing in Nature Climate Change suggest a paradigm shift in how climate scientists approach climate change impact assessments. They suggest examining the system or potential catastrophe first instead of making the starting point a climate scenario.
In 2005 the Amazon experienced a once in a century drought. Five years later, in 2010, it was struck by an even worse drought, with even lower rainfall occurring in the dry season. However, the response of the Amazon forest to these two once-in-a-century events showed marked differences.
New research published in Nature Geoscience has found that climate engineering that modifies the properties of the land surface in highly populated areas and agricultural areas over North America, Europe and Asia could reduce extreme temperatures there by up to 2-3°C.
Understanding which plant species can recover from drought, under what conditions and the processes involved, will help researchers predict plant mortality in response to global climate change. In response to drought, some species die because of embolism-induced hydraulic failure, while others recover, following rehydration. This research focuses on structures and processes that might allow some plants to recover from drought stress via embolism reversal.
The reduction in growth of plants restricted by limitations on nutrients, temperature and/or water stress, didn't just reduce photosynthesis but led to negative feedbacks in plant carbon balance processes.
When researchers compared the results derived from FLUXNET data with the results synthesised from the literature, they found substantial differences. As a result, they suggest a new benchmarking metric that could be used to test existing hypotheses embedded in climate models and have mapped a path forward involving using further detailed observations to improve the way coupling/decoupling processes currently represented in climate models.
This study explored the key sources of uncertainty when scaling leaf-level understanding of water-use efficiency to ecosystem scales. The results provide key insights into interpreting (ecosystem-scale) eddy-covariance derived water-use efficiency in an ecophysiological context.
This paper combines existing global evapotranspiration estimates to create a new global product with an observationally constrained estimate of uncertainty. It utilises the latest release of ground-based estimates to show that even point-based evapotranspiration estimates have information about much larger spatial scales.