4.7 Article

Variability in frost occurrence under climate change and consequent risk of damage to trees of western Quebec, Canada

Journal

SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 12, Issue 1, Pages -

Publisher

NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-11105-y

Keywords

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Funding

  1. Consortium on Regional Climatology and Adaptation to Climate Change OURA-NOS
  2. National Science and Engineer Research Council of Canada
  3. Bavarian State Ministry for the Environment and Consumer Protection
  4. Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
  5. Bavarian State Ministry of Education, Science and the Arts
  6. Mitacs

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Climate change has limited our understanding of the impacts of frost on plant growth and survival. The uncertainty of climate models is mainly caused by internal variability and different physical formulations. This study provides an initial estimate of the relative importance of these uncertainties on the occurrence of frost and their potential damage to trees, highlighting the continued threat of frost to trees under global warming.
Climate change affects timings, frequency, and intensity of frost events in northern ecosystems. However, our understanding of the impacts that frost will have on growth and survival of plants is still limited. When projecting the occurrence of frost, the internal variability and the different underlying physical formulations are two major sources of uncertainty of climate models. We use 50 climate simulations produced by a single-initial large climate ensemble and five climate simulations produced by different pairs of global and regional climate models based on the concentration pathway (RCP 8.5) over a latitudinal transect covering the temperate and boreal ecosystems of western Quebec, Canada, during 1955-2099 to provide a first-order estimate of the relative importance of these two sources of uncertainty on the occurrence of frost, i.e. when air temperature is< 0 degrees C, and their potential damage to trees. The variation in the date of the last spring frost was larger by 21 days (from 46 to 25 days) for the 50 climate simulations compared to the 5 different pairs of climate models. When considering these two sources of uncertainty in an eco-physiological model simulating the timings of budbreak for trees of northern environment, results show that 20% of climate simulations expect that trees will be exposed to frost even in 2090. Thus, frost damage to trees remains likely under global warming.

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