Downscaling land use and land cover from the Global Change Assessment Model
for coupling with Earth system models

Le Page, Yannick; West, Tris O.; Link, Robert; Patel, Pralit

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-3055-2016

Articles | Volume 9, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-3055-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-3055-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 9

Model description paper

|

02 Sep 2016

Model description paper |

| 02 Sep 2016

Downscaling land use and land cover from the Global Change Assessment Model for coupling with Earth system models

Yannick Le Page, Tris O. West, Robert Link, and Pralit Patel

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-3055-2016-supplement

Data sets

GCAMLU: a downscaling system to allocate GCAM's land use and land cover scenarios from Region/AEZ scale to a grid Y. Le Page, T. O. West, R. Link, and P. Patel https://github.com/JGCRI/GCAMLU

Short summary

A computer program was developed to transform maps of regional land use (e.g., crops) and land cover (e.g., forests) areas into gridded maps actually representing their spatial distribution within each region. This is important for studies of future environmental change: economic models project agricultural activities at the regional scale, but Earth system models need gridded information to project the impact of such activities on climate, biodiversity, water availability, and other aspects.