Biogeophysical effects of land-use and land-cover change not detectable in warmest month

Yet, near-surface temperature responses to land use across observational versus model -based studies and spatial-temporal scales can be inconsistent. Here we assess the prevalence of the historical land use signal of daily maximum temperatures averaged over the warmest month of the year (tLU) using regularized optimal fingerprint-ing for detection and attribution.

We use observations from the Climatic Research Unit and Berkeley Earth alongside his-torical simulations with and without land use from phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project to reconstruct an experiment representing the effects of land use on climate. To assess the signal of land use at spatially resolved conti-nental and global scales, we aggregate all input data across reference regions and continents, respectively.