Abstract
Many lakes and wetlands exist in the Arctic. Their storage effects have the potential to improve the surface hydrology simulation and to decrease the surface air temperature bias. There are, however, only few global land surface models that incorporate wetlands and the effects upon climate are not yet well investigated. In the present study, we examine these effects through sensitivity experiments using MATSIRO land surface model with a simple wetland scheme that stores part of snowmelt. First, we conduct offline global land simulations and evaluate the results using multiple observations. The result shows that the river discharge simulation in the major Arctic river basins and the underestimation of evapotranspiration are improved. Further, we conduct a series of on-line AGCM experiments using MIROC5 with climatological monthly SST and sea ice boundary conditions. The result shows that the impact of wetland scheme upon the reduction of near surface air temperature in summer is significant.
