Understanding the Tropical rainforest productivity and its response to climate variability
The Moorcroft lab is working with collaborators to combine cutting-edge Earth system modeling with diverse field and satellite observations to uncover why the Amazon and Congo, which are the planet’s two largest tropical rainforests, respond differently to climate change and human activity, and what those differences mean for the global carbon cycle.
Tropical rainforests play a vital role in shaping the strength of the global carbon sink and in terrestrial carbon-climate feedbacks. However, our understanding of the spatial heterogeneity of tropical ecosystem responses to climate variability is limited. In particular, the carbon cycle of tropical rainforests exhibits distinct responses to climate change/variability and anthropogenic activities across tropical continents, notably between Amazon and Congo, the two largest rainforests in the world. Nevertheless, to date, it remains poorly understood the mechanistic drivers responsible for the intercontinental differences in such responses as well as the resulting global consequence and climate feedbacks.
Working in collaboration with the Sun lab (link: https://www.yingsun.info/), we are integrating simulations of ELM-FATES (Energy Land Model - Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator, the new land component of E3SM) with a diverse suite of observations (in-situ inventories, eddy covariance (EC) fluxes, solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF), and other satellite remote sensing products) that span from local to regional scales. The objective is to: 1) characterize the spatial heterogeneity of tropical carbon cycle and its climate response from seasonal to decadal scales; 2) identify and attribute the key mechanisms driving the discrepancy between existing earth system models and observations in reproducing the spatial patterns of tropical carbon cycle and the climate response; and 3) inform future ELM-FATES development.
