Simulation of Late Permian climate and biomes with an atmosphere-ocean model: comparisons with observations

A climate model is used to simulate the climate of the Late Permian. The climate model employs more detailed prescriptions of land-ocean boundaries, topography, and inland lakes and seas than were used in previous climate simulations of supercontinents with idealized land-ocean boundaries and no topography. The presence of mountains and plateaus and of inland seas and lakes produce large differences in the simulated climate compared to simulations that omit these features. Mountains and plateaus become focal points for enhanced precipitation and also help to intensify the monsoon circulations. Extensive inland seas and lakes exert a strong local damping of the seasonal range of temperature and also cause changes beyond the lakes region due to dynamical and hydrological effects. Using the climate-biome classification scheme of Walter, the simulated distribution of climates-biomes is compared to the observed distribution of Late Permian vegetation-biomes. Agreement is good in all but two areas.