COUP: Constraining uncertainties in the permafrost-climate feedback

随着全球气候变暖，永久冻土的融化可能导致北极和北方生态系统的温室气体排放增加。科学家们一致认为，这种永久冻土气候反馈对全球气候系统很重要，但其规模和时间仍然知之甚少。COUP的总体目标是利用对全球尺度过程的详细了解来改进全球尺度气候模式。更好地预测永久冻土区将如何应对气候变暖，可以帮助我们理解和规划未来的全球变化。近年来，人们在研究冻土生态系统对气候变暖的复杂响应方面取得了很大进展。尽管如此，在将这些过程纳入全球气候模型方面仍然存在巨大挑战。多年冻土生态系统是高度可变的，研究表明，需要非常详细的实地调查，以了解复杂性。由于全球规模的模型不能运行在这样的高分辨率，我们提出了一种方法，当地的大规模的实地研究和建模，以确定这些关键变量，应改善全球模型。我们将在实地进行仔细的实地研究和高分辨率建模，涵盖所有泛欧亚环境条件。由此获得的系统理解将用于（1）缩放关键变量，使其对全球模型有用，以及（2）改进新的全球气候模型。在最后一步，将运行改进的全球气候模型，以量化永久冻土融化对全球气候的影响。COUP产生的数据集将在网上免费提供，以便其他科学家可以使用，并帮助改进所有全球气候模型。COUP旨在最大限度地发挥与正在进行的项目的协同作用。所需的大部分数据和对系统的了解是在其他研究方案中产生的。

As the global climate warms, thawing permafrost may lead to increased greenhouse gas release from Arctic and Boreal ecosystems. Scientists agree that this permafrost-climate feedback is important to the global climate system, but its magnitude and timing remains poorly understood. The overall aim of COUP is to use detailed understanding of landscape-scale processes to improve global scale climate models. Better predictions of how permafrost areas will respond to a warming climate can help us understand and plan for future global change. In recent years much scientific progress has been made towards understanding the complex responses of permafrost ecosystem to climate warming. Despite this, large challenges remain when it comes to including these processes in global climate models. Permafrost ecosystems are highly variable and studies show that very detailed field investigations are needed to understand complexities. Because global scale models cannot run at such high-resolutions, we propose an approach where local landscape-scale field studies and modelling are used to identify those key variables that should be improved in global models. We will carry out careful field studies and high-resolution modelling at field sites covering all pan-Eurasian environmental conditions. The system understanding gained from this will then be used to (1) scale key variables so they are useful for global models and (2) improve a new global climate model. In the final step, the improved global climate models will be run to quantify the impact of thawing permafrost on the global climate. Datasets produced in COUP will be freely available online so that they can be used by other scientists and help improvement of all global climate models. COUP is designed to maximise synergies with ongoing projects. Much of the needed data and system understanding was generated in other research programmes.