Publication Date:
2017-09-27
Description:
Increasing concern about the impacts of climate change on ecosystems is prompting
ecologists and ecosystem managers to seek reliable projections of physical drivers of
change. The use of global climate models in ecology is growing, although drawing
ecologically meaningful conclusions can be problematic. The expertise required to
access and interpret output fromclimate and earth systemmodels is hampering progress
in utilizing them most effectively to determine the wider implications of climate change. To
address this issue, we present a joint approach between climate scientists and ecologists
that explores key challenges and opportunities for progress. As an exemplar, our focus
is the Southern Ocean, notable for significant change with global implications, and on
sea ice, given its crucial role in this dynamic ecosystem. We combined perspectives
to evaluate the representation of sea ice in global climate models. With an emphasis
on ecologically-relevant criteria (sea ice extent and seasonality) we selected a subset of
eight models that reliably reproduce extant sea ice distributions. While the model subset
shows a similar mean change to the full ensemble in sea ice extent (approximately 50%
decline in winter and 30% decline in summer), there is a marked reduction in the range.
This improved the precision of projected future sea ice distributions by approximately
one third, and means they are more amenable to ecological interpretation. We conclude
that careful multidisciplinary evaluation of climate models, in conjunction with ongoing
modeling advances, should form an integral part of utilizing model output.
Repository Name:
EPIC Alfred Wegener Institut
Type:
Article
,
isiRev
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