The role of the land surface in weather and climate: does the land surface matter?

It is rather common in much of IGBPrelated science to draw figures with time and space as the axes (e.g. Figure 1 in Sellers, 1992). We make no apology for doing it again since this links the key aspects of those natural systems of interest to us. We have tried to take one additional step, however. Our Figure 1 shows where we believe there is evidence, published in the scientific literature, that the land surface does matter to weather and climate. We split this evidence depending on whether it is observational or modelling derived and we review the context of the evidence in more detail below. This figure appears to show negligible overlap between observational evidence and modelling evidence. Where the evidence does overlap, it is either at the global scale on time scales of centuries (in terms of palaeoclimatic reconstructions), or it is at small scales. This apparent lack of overlap is discussed in the conclusions.

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