Emission metrics such as GWP or GTP are used to put non-CO₂ species on a CO₂-equivalent scale. In the fifth IPCC report the metrics are inconsistent, as the climate–carbon feedback is included only for CO₂ but not for non-CO₂ species. Here, we simulate a new impulse response function for the feedback, and we use it to correct the metrics. For instance, 1 g of CH₄ is equivalent to 31 g of CO₂ (instead of 28 g) following the corrected GWP100 metric. It is 34 g if other factors are also updated.

Human societies depend on the resources ecosystems provide. We study this coevolutionary relationship by utilizing a stylized model of resource users on a social network. This model demonstrates that social–cultural processes can have a profound influence on the environmental state, such as determining whether the resources collapse from overuse or not. This suggests that social–cultural processes should receive more attention in the modeling of sustainability transitions and the Earth system.

The prognostic experiments conducted with the reference mass balance show that the grounding line would retreat by about 10 km in the three ice streams over a time period of 500 years. In the experiments, the ice flow velocities in the ice streams decreased with time. These trends in the ice flow velocities diminished the overall ice flux. The modeled evolution of the ice streams is in agreement with observations of ice mass loss in Severnaya Zemlya archipelago (Moholdt et al., 2012).

The study wishes to better characterize the annual and semiannual cycles of surface temperature and baroclinicity at midlatitudes as observed in ERA-Interim reanalysis data and AOGCM simulations. Results show that at the semiannual frequency model phases between surface temperature and baroclinicity have wide dispersion in both hemispheres with large errors in the estimates, denoting uncertainty and a degree of disagreement among models.

The Arctic has been warming much faster than the rest of the globe, including Antarctica. Here it was shown that one of the important mechanisms that sets Antarctica apart from the Arctic is heat transport from lower latitudes, and it was argued that a decrease in land height due to Antarctic melting would be favorable for increased atmospheric heat transport from midlatitudes. Other factors related to the larger Antarctic land height were also investigated.

A first comprehensive and systematic hydroclimatic trend analysis for the upper Indus Basin suggests warming and drying of spring and rising early melt-season discharge over 1995–2012 period. In contrast, cooling and falling or weakly rising discharge is found within summer monsoon period that coincides well with main glacier melt season. Such seasonally distinct changes, indicating dominance of snow but suppression of glacial melt regime, address hydroclimatic explanation of Karakoram Anomaly.

Land-use change is still overly simplistically implemented in global ecosystem and climate models. We identify and discuss three major challenges at the interface of land-use and climate modeling and propose ways for how to improve land-use representation in climate models. We conclude that land-use data-provider and user communities need to engage in the joint development and evaluation of enhanced land-use datasets to improve the quantification of land use–climate interactions and feedback.

The present study (1) evaluates land–atmosphere coupling in the CMIP5 multi-model ensemble against an ensemble of benchmarking datasets and (2) refines the model ensemble using a land–atmosphere coupling diagnostic as constraint. Our study demonstrates that a considerable fraction of coupled climate models overemphasize warm-season moisture-limited climate regimes in midlatitude regions. This leads to biases in daily-scale temperature extremes, which are alleviated in a constrained ensemble.

Atmospheric conditions at the onset of the December 2014 flood in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, are described. Results show that the antecedent precipitation index (API) is able to reflect soil moisture conditions and, in combination with the maximum 3–day precipitation sum (R3d), to capture the main drivers ultimately leading to this flood. Trend analyses indicate an increasing risk of flood-prone situations over the last decades in this region. Further analyses are planned at the German coasts.

The article analysed the problems of aeolian relief changes. The changes are determined by climate, neo-tectonics, and human impact. The most important climate factors are wind speed and wind direction. Strong permanent winds induced fast sand drying and activated deflation processes, which were further accelerated by a constant stream of visitors to the dunes. The neo-tectonic movements formed micro-terraces on the eastern dune slope, which changes on wet sand pressure.

Weather and climate models have improved steadily over time, but the models remain imperfect. Given these imperfect models, predictions might be improved by combining the models into a so-called “supermodel”. In this paper we show a new method to construct such a supermodel. The results indicate that the supermodel has superior forecast quality compared to the individual models.

The Amazon River basin continuously transfers massive volumes of water from the land surface to the atmosphere, thereby having massive influence on global climate patterns. Nonetheless, the characteristics of ET across the Amazon basin, as well as the relative contribution of the multiple drivers to this process, are still uncertain. This study carries out a water balance approach to analyse seasonal patterns in ET and their relationships with water and energy drivers across the Amazon Basin.

In this paper we describe the development and application of a new spatially explicit weathering scheme within the University of Victoria Earth System Climate Model (UVic ESCM). We integrated a dataset of modern-day lithology with a number of previously devised parameterizations for weathering dependency on temperature, primary productivity, and runoff. We tested the model with simulations of future carbon cycle perturbations and confirmed the importance of silicate weathering in the long term.