Type 1- L012170218: Collaborative Research: Ecosystem Impacts of Variability and Extreme Events in the Arctic

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The proposed project will provide a high-latitude regional focus for several of the primary objectives of the Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction program: an evaluation of regional variability and extreme events as simulated by a state-of-the-art global system model (the Community Earth System Model, CESM); quantification of the impacts of climate variability on the marine ecosystem, the terrestrial landscape and sea ice in the Arctic; and the ability of the Community Earth System Model to capture ecosystem-relevant variability over seasonal to decadal timescales. The system model enhancements will focus on marine ecosystem, which will be included through a spatially explicit lower trophic food web model encompassing nutrients, phytoplankton and zooplankton. The terrestrial tasks will include more advanced formulations of fire and related phenological processes for incorporation into CESM, enabling evaluations of the sensitivities of terrestrial changes to potentially predictable variations in the drivers of land surface processes. Finally, sea ice variability has been shown to influence both the marine ecosystem (by altering the environment of phytoplankton blooms and their interactions with other trophic levels) and the surrounding terrestrial regions (through temperature and moisture fluxes), highlighting the need for an emphasis on sea ice in an earth system model approach to predicting Arctic variability on seasonal to decadal timescales. The broader impacts of the proposed work include the potential for incorporating into a state-of-the-art system model a marine ecosystem module that includes fish, marine mammals and, eventually, fishing pressure, thereby serving as a tool for planning and decision-making. In the terrestrial realm, the modification of the high-latitude landscape by fire will likely be increasingly important not only for planning and adaptation locally, but for feedbacks to the broader climate system through surface properties and carbon exchange.