Local and Non-Local Biophysical Impacts of Deforestation on Global Temperature During Boreal Summer: CMIP6-LUMIP Multimodel Analysis

Biophysical effects of forest cover changes are often neglected by climate policies and recent state-of-the-art climate models exhibit wide spreads in simulating the biophysical impacts of deforestation. By using the CMIP6-LUMIP simulations, here we examined the biophysical impacts of deforestation on global temperature and attributed deforestation-induced surface temperature change to different biophysical effects (i.e., radiative forcing, aerodynamic resistance, Bowen ratio and atmospheric feedbacks) at regional scales. Results show that models agree on the sign of temperature responses to different biophysical factors in the tropics, but exhibit wide divergence in the extratropical regions. Among the three local biophysical factors (i.e., radiative forcing, aerodynamic resistance, and Bowen ratio), aerodynamic resistance contributes largely to local surface warming in models. As the local effects rarely affect the areas away from the deforested regions, much of the modeled discrepancies result from non-local atmospheric feedbacks in the middle and high latitudes. Our results suggest that climate responses to deforestation have a large spread in current models and highlight the need to improve our understanding and modeling of non-local effects in the biophysical impacts of deforestation.