Land-climate interactions and feedbacks in high-latitude regions

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The Canadian high-latitude regions, with their innumerable lakes, wetlands, rivers and permafrost, and their complex interactions with the atmosphere offer significant challenges to climate modellers. These interactions, though important, are difficult to investigate due to the scarcity of relevant observations and the complexity of underlying processes and feedbacks. The central aim of the proposed research program is to improve understanding of the high-latitude land-climate interactions and feedbacks through numerical experiments with a regional climate model and available observations. The main questions that will be addressed include the impact of changing cryospheric elements such as permafrost, thermokarst lakes, snow cover and lake-ice on land-climate interactions and feedbacks from current to future climate, role of peatlands in modulating permafrost evolution, importance of groundwater-climate interactions and the role of land-atmosphere feedbacks in modulating extreme temperature and precipitation events across Canada, which have not been investigated extensively so far. Interactions between the atmosphere and the underlying surface are important and determine the evolution of many near-surface fields. The results of the research will be readily transferable for their operational implementation in regional climate models, which will then support more physically realistic simulations of surface and sub-surface climate processes over Canada and the Arctic region and can be applied in climate-change assessment studies to provide government and commercial agencies with the most accurate projections of future climate conditions, at a wide range of temporal horizons. This will yield a solid platform on which Canada's provincial and federal governments can plan for future climate change.