Biophysical impact of land-use and land-cover change on subgrid temperature in CMIP6 models

Our study is motivated by the fact that ongoing land-use activities are occurring at local scales, typically significantly smaller than the resolvable scale of a grid cell in Earth system models. It aims to explore the potential for a multimodel ap-proach to better characterize LULCC local climatic effects.

On an annual scale, the CMIP6 models are in general agree-ment that croplands are warmer than primary and secondary land (psl; mainly forests, grasslands, and bare ground) in the tropics and cooler in the mid-high latitudes, except for one model. The transition from warming to cooling occurs at ap-proximately 40 degrees N. Although the surface heating potential, which combines albedo and latent heat flux effects, can explain reasonably well the zonal mean latitudinal subgrid temperature variations between crop and psl tiles in the historical simu-lations, it does not provide a good prediction on subgrid temperature for other land tile configurations (crop vs forest; grass vs forest) under Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 5-8.5 (SSP5-8.5) forcing scenarios.