NUMERICAL STUDY USING AN ATMOSPHERIC GENERAL CIRCULATION MODEL WITH AN ACTUAL ORA POTENTIAL VEGETATION DISTRIBUTION

Abstract

Interactions between the atmosphere and the biosphere are important for climate studies. We investigate changes of an atmospheric condition as a result of changing vegetation distribution using an atmospheric general circulation model. Two types of vegetation distribution become available recently. The first is an actual vegetation distribution, which was obtained from remote-sensing data (Kajiwara et al.). The second is a potential vegetation distribution, which was obtainedby natural vegetation models (Box et al.) that estimate vegetation type based onlocal climatological conditions. Two boundary conditions are prepared based on these distributions and each numerical simulation is conducted. It is found that the difference in vegetation has significant impact on the simulated climate. While regions covered with more amount of vegetation mainly tend to have more precipitaion, several regions become dry climate in spite of abundance in vegetation. It is suspected out that the model's deficiency in representing moisture transport by transient weather systems could be a reason for such discrepancy.