Abstract
Global studies of climate change impacts that use future climate model
projections also require projections of land surface changes. Simulated
land surface performance in Earth System models is often affected by
climate biases of the atmospheric models, leading to errors in land
surface projections. Here we run the JULES-ES land surface model with
ISIMIP2b bias-corrected climate model data from 4 global climate models
(GCMs). The bias correction reduces the impact of the climate biases
present in individual models. We evaluate JULES-ES performance against
present-day observations to demonstrate its usefulness for providing
required information for impacts such as fire and river flow. We
simulate a historical and two future scenarios; a mitigation scenario
RCP2.6 and RCP6.0, which has very little mitigation. We include a
standard JULES-ES configuration without fire as a contribution to
ISIMIP2b and JULES-ES with fire as a potential future development.
Simulations for gross primary productivity, evapotranspiration (ET) and
albedo compare well against observations. Including fire improves the
simulations, especially for ET and albedo and vegetation distribution,
with some degradation in shrub cover and river flow. This configuration
represents some of the most current earth system science for land
surface modelling. The suite associated with this configuration provides
a basis for past and future phases of ISIMIP, providing a simulation
setup, postprocessing and initial evaluation using ILAMB. This suite
ensures that it is as straightforward, reproducible and transparent as
possible to follow the protocols and participate fully in ISIMIP using
JULES.