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Abstract

The terrestrial biosphere is exposed to land-use and climate change, which not only affects vegetation dynamics, but also changes land-atmosphere feedbacks. Specifically, changes in land-cover affect biophysical feedbacks of water and energy, therefore contributing to climate change. In this study, we couple the well established and comprehensively validated Dynamic Global Vegetation Model LPJmL5 to the coupled climate model CM2Mc, which is based on the atmosphere model AM2 and the ocean model MOM5 (CM2Mc-LPJmL). In CM2Mc, we replace the simple land surface model LaD (where vegetation is static and prescribed) with LPJmL5 and fully couple the water and energy cycles using the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Flexible Modeling System (FMS). Several improvements to LPJmL5 were implemented to allow a fully functional biophysical coupling. These include a sub-daily cycle for calculating energy and water fluxes, a conductance of the soil evaporation and plant interception, a canopy-layer humidity, and the surface energy balance in order to calculate the surface and canopy layer temperature within LPJmL5. Exchanging LaD by LPJmL5, and therefore switching from a static and prescribed vegetation to a dynamic vegetation, allows us to model important biosphere processes, including fire, mortality, permafrost, hydrological cycling, and the impacts of managed land (crop growth and irrigation). Our results show that CM2Mc-LPJmL has similar temperature and precipitation biases as the original CM2Mc model with LaD. Performance of LPJmL5 in the coupled system compared to Earth observation data and to LPJmL offline simulation results is within acceptable error margins. The historic global mean temperature evolution of our model setup is within the range of CMIP5 models. The comparison of model runs with and without land-use change shows a partially warmer and drier climate state across the global land surface. CM2Mc-LPJmL opens new opportunities to investigate important biophysical vegetation-climate feedbacks with a state-of-the-art and process-based dynamic vegetation model.