Analysis and modelling of climate-land cover interactions with a carbon cycle perspective

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Interactions between climate and the carbon cycle have long been recognized as important in determining the Planet's climate state. These complex interactions involve exchanges between the atmosphere, ocean, bottom sediments, land surface and biota and are fundamental, by setting the atmospheric concentration of CO2, in the determination of the Planet's radiative budget. Through its connection to the biosphere, the carbon cycle also has a significant impact on other parameters relevant to climate such as albedo, surface roughness and evapotranspiration. All these interactions play an important role on the climate response to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and it is clear that the detailed and reliable predictions required by society in the face of future climate change must be based on a solid understanding of these climate-carbon cycle connections. Moreover, this understanding must be incorporated into the global and regional models being used to generate these predictions. The recent advent of numerical coupled global climate-carbon cycle models constitutes a significant advancement for the field. Crucial to the predictive skills of such models is their ability to account for vegetation dynamics which, by influencing fluxes of mass and energy between the land surface and the atmosphere, play an important role in climate over a broad range of temporal and spatial scales. This research proposal is aimed, in the long-term, at enhancing our understanding of the interaction between vegetation dynamics and climate through the application and development of coupled climate-carbon cycle models. Its short-term goals are: i) To increase the predictive skills of current models through the development of a parameterization for insect impact on mid- to high-latitude forests - a process that, although being of great importance to the carbon budget of these ecosystems, is presently absent from global models; and ii) To quantify, through a unprecedentedly large number of numerical simulations, the response of vegetation cover to climate change and iii) To quantify the climatic effects of human-induced vegetation cover change, including work to generate a, presently inexistent, realistic representation of afforestation in a Global Circulation Model.