The ORNL DAAC is pleased to announce the release of a data set from the North American Carbon Program (NACP):
CMS: Land Cover Projections (5.6-km) from GCAM v3.1 for Conterminous USA, 2005-2095 . Data set prepared by T.O. West and Y. Le Page.
This data set provides annual land cover projections for years 2005 through 2095 generated by the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) Version 3.1. For the conterminous USA, the GCAM global gridded results were downscaled to ~5.6 km (0.05 degree) resolution. For each 5.6 x 5.6-km area, the annual land cover percentage comprised by each of the nineteen different land cover classes/plant functional types (PFTs) of the Community Land Model (CLM) are provided.
Results are reported for three scenarios of future human efforts towards climate mitigation as related to global carbon emissions, radiative forcing, and land cover change: a reference scenario with no explicit climate mitigation efforts that reaches a radiative forcing level of over 7 W/m2 in 2100; the 2.6 mitigation pathway (MP) scenario which is a very low emission scenario with a mid-century peak in radiative forcing at ~3 W/m2, declining to 2.6 W/m2 in 2100; and a 4.5 MP scenario which stabilizes radiative forcing at 4.5 W/m2 (~ 650 ppm CO2-equivalent) before 2100.
The Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), initiated and directed through a 2010 Congressional Appropriation, is a forward-looking initiative designed to make significant contributions in characterizing, quantifying, understanding, and predicting the evolution of global carbon sources and sinks through improved monitoring of carbon stocks and fluxes.
The ORNL DAAC is a NASA-funded data center archiving and distributing terrestrial ecology and biogeochemical dynamics data.