Changes in climatic characteristics of Northern Hemisphere extratropical land in the 21st century: Assessments with the IAP RAS climate model

Impact of climate changes over the extratropical land on permafrost dynamics under RCP scenarios in the 21st century as simulated by the IAP RAS climate model

“…The total area of the snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere in February as computed by the IAP RAS climate model for 2001-2010 is 46 million km 2 that agrees well with the empirical estimates of 43.2 million km 2 [18] and 44-48 million km 2 [42] as well as with the results of IAP RAS CM computations for 1961-1990 (47.4 ± 1.8 million km 2 ) [13] and during the ensemble numerical experiments with the global atmosphereocean circulation models (49 ± 4 million km 2 ) [23]. By the recent decade of the 21st century, the area of the snow cover in February under RCP scenarios decreases in IAP RAS CM by 4-13 million km 2 depending on the scenario (by 8.7% under RCP 2.6 and by 28.3% under RCP 8.5).…”

“…The estimates of snow cover area reduction by the late 21st century as computed from the CMIP5 ensemble of climate models are 7.2 ± 3.8% under RCP 2.6 and 24.7 ± 7.7% under RCP 8.5 scenario [30]. Similar estimates under SRES family scenarios are 13-16 million km 2 as computed from IAP RAS CM [13] and 6 ± 2 million km 2 as computed from the ensemble of global atmosphere-ocean circulation models [23].…”

A global climate model based, Bayesian climate projection for northern extra–tropical land areas

“…Thickness of this layers smoothly increases from 5 cm in the upper 10 metres of soil column to 1 m at the bottom part of the computational domain. The scheme was validated against observations in (Arzhanov et al, 2007;Arzhanov et al, 2008b) and subsequently implemented in the IAP RAS global climate model (Arzhanov et al, 2008a;Eliseev et al, 2009). Table 1 The list of global climate models used in the present work.…”

“…According to the contemporary model projections, near-surface permafrost degradation may become widespread in Eurasia and in North America (Meleshko et al, 2004b;Lawrence and Slater, 2005;Saito et al, 2007;Eliseev et al, 2009;Nadyozhina et al, 2010).…”

Hysteresis of the surface permafrost area dependence on the global temperature

“…Such warming should be accompanied by gen eral degradation of the permafrost [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. At present, along with the scenarios of the anthropogenic impact on the climate leading to its further warming, other scenarios are also being considered, which could restore the preindustrial climate state after such warming (see, for example, http://climate.uvic.ca/EMICAR5).…”