TY - JOUR A1 - Dallmeyer, Anne A1 - Kleinen, Thomas A1 - Claussen, Martin A1 - Weitzel, Nils A1 - Cao, Xianyong A1 - Herzschuh, Ulrike T1 - The deglacial forest conundrum JF - Nature Communications N2 - How fast the Northern Hemisphere (NH) forest biome tracks strongly warming climates is largely unknown. Regional studies reveal lags between decades and millennia. Here we report a conundrum: Deglacial forest expansion in the NH extra-tropics occurs approximately 4000 years earlier in a transient MPI-ESM1.2 simulation than shown by pollen-based biome reconstructions. Shortcomings in the model and the reconstructions could both contribute to this mismatch, leaving the underlying causes unresolved. The simulated vegetation responds within decades to simulated climate changes, which agree with pollen-independent reconstructions. Thus, we can exclude climate biases as main driver for differences. Instead, the mismatch points at a multi-millennial disequilibrium of the NH forest biome to the climate signal. Therefore, the evaluation of time-slice simulations in strongly changing climates with pollen records should be critically reassessed. Our results imply that NH forests may be responding much slower to ongoing climate changes than Earth System Models predict.
Deglacial forest expansion in the Northern Hemisphere poses a conundrum: Model results agree with the climate signal but are several millennia ahead of reconstructed forest dynamics. The underlying causes remain unsolved. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33646-6 SN - 2041-1723 VL - 13 IS - 1 PB - Nature Publishing Group UK CY - [London] ER -