Over the last decade there has been a tremendous increase in the literature regarding the impact of land cover change on climate at the regional and global scale. As with most of the work on the impact of Amazonian deforestation, modelling groups have used different models, different land parameterizations, different land-cover maps, different model configurations and different experimental protocols. As a result, the actual impact of large scale land cover change on the Earth's climate is firmly believed to be one of significant and large, only local to the perturbation, or small enough to be ignored. Some groups find significant teleconnections that other groups dismiss as model variability. 

In discussions within IGBP-iLEAPS and GEWEX-GLASS, a sense that the land cover change community had proven to itself that land cover change was important, but not proven to the major modelling groups how important led to a decision to launch a major experiment to evaluate the impact of land-use induced land-cover changes on climate.

Under the auspices of GEWEX-GLASS and IGBP-iLEAPS, a project called LUCID has therefore been launched. LUCID is not trying to identify model-specific sensitivities to land cover change, rather we seek to explore, using methodologies that the major climate modelling groups recognise, those impacts of land cover change that are robust - that is, above the noise generated by model variability.

LUCID objective is therefore to identify and quantify the impacts of land-used induced land-cover changes on the evolution of climate between the pre-industrial epoch and present-day. We will use a) multi-model and b) ensemble simulations to assess the robustness of the identified changes. Assessments of the impacts of land cover change will explore the mean climate, climate variability and climate extremes. Assessment will also be made on the potential impact land-use induced land-cover change can have on the sea-surface temperatures and on ocean circulation. Among the final objectives is to build the case, if the case can be proven, to ensure land-cover changes are included in any future assessments by the IPCC.

Project coordinators: Natalie de Noblet-Ducoudre and Andy Pitman.