Download 1 - FORCLIM PROJECT

1.1 Analysis and prediction of climate change and weather anomalies of
the important factors for forestry (Szalai, S., OMSz)
Objectives
Climate has been changed in the past and will change in the future. These changes
happened relatively fast. Some changes were very fast, but it occurred slower modifications,
too. There are evidences of the human influence on climate, and we assume, that this effect
will be grow by the accumulation, and consequently, the increase of temperature will be
accelerated. Due to the most appreciated reports, the global warming reached about 0,6°C
(±0,2°C) in the last century and some climate scenarios predict up to 6°C warming for the
21st century.
The components of the climate system have different inertia. The atmosphere is quite
unified, but the hydrosphere contains several subsystems with different response time. Similar
to that, subsystems have a wide distribution of characteristic time in the biosphere. Forest has
the largest inertia among the biospherical subsystems, because the response time expands
from couple of decades up to several hundreds of years in dependence of tree species.
Therefore, the possible climate change will effect mostly on the forests within the biosphere.
Climate primarily determines the plant cover. The present forest climate classification
can be improved by the involvement of more climatologically parameters and development in
the temporal and spatial distributions. Therefore, we need climate maps with high resolution.
The editorial work is just finished on the Climate Atlas of Hungary 1961-1990, where the
climatologically fields were created by interpolation and not manually.
Methods
The interpolation of the meteorological fields is a very difficult problem, witch does not
have an overall good solution. The simplest interpolation methods have not an adequate
physical basis. Therefore, the better methods commonly used are the kriging and cokriging.
Presently, our maps have a spatial resolution about 1 km x 1 km, but the HMS owns the
DDM-100 topographical model, where the distance between the grid points are 100 m.
Consequently, the resolution is up to 50 m. The mostly used best temporal resolution is 1
month, but it can be some cases even better. These temporal and spatial resolutions satisfy our
request within this project.
The choices of the investigated parameters are very important. The significant factors
determinate the plant cover are the averages, but the limitations are created by extreme values
and their frequency. Most important averages are the monthly, seasonal and annual means of
temperature and precipitation sums. Task specific is the individual investigation of vegetation
period.
These investigations have different characteristic time periods. They differ in the case of
monitoring network, timber production research, etc. Therefore, the fields mentioned above
will be created in many different time intervals.
The extreme values in the 20th century will be discussed in detail. These investigations
are important for the evaluation of the whole century even in that case, when the forestry time
series are much shorter than the climatologically ones. Asymptotical distribution function will
be fit for calculation of the return period of temperature and precipitation in one-dimensional
case, and Kernel method will be used for the critical situations from point of view of the
development of plant cover in multidimensional case.
The forest strategy of a possible climate change can be established based of the
connection resulted from the above-mentioned researches. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel of
Climate Change) developed many scenarios for the future. Many of them differ not very much
for each other. We downscale the most important ones to get a regional view of the global
change. We apply the main climatic parameters, which serve as an input for the forest models.
Results
The main tasks of the climatologically part of this project are to describe as exact as
possible the change within the forest parameters by climatologically factors, and due these
descriptions to serve the future conditions for the forest management policies. These tasks
make possible better to know the changes in the past and establish the planning for the future.
The visualization of the data fields will be done by the Arc Info and Arc View
software’s possessed already by HMS. These software’s make possible the export and import
of data for the other participants of the project.