The BOREAS Information System

TE-21: Simulation of Boreal Ecosystem Carbon and Water Budgets: Scaling from Local to Regional Extents

P.I.(s): Steven Running -- University of Montana
Co-I(s): Ramakrishna Nemani -- Univ. of Montana; David Peterson, Jennifer Dungan, Joseph Coughlan -- NASA/ARC; David Harding -- NASA/GSFC; Eric Wood -- Princeton Univ.; L. Scuderi -- Boston Univ.; Anthony Price, T. Carleton -- Univ. of Toronto

Objectives: To simulate boreal landscape/atmosphere exchange processes and the scaling behavior of these processes from local to regional extents. Our emphasis is boreal ecosystem water and carbon flux processes, which will be simulated using a suite of models based on the processes of photosynthesis, respiration, evapotranspiration and surface and subsurface hydrologic flow. The implications of model and data generalization on the agreement between simulated and measured flux rates will be explored by constructing a hierarchy of modeling and surface parameterization methods. Each level in the hierarchy will vary in the degree of complexity of process and surface representation. The set of computed surface flux rates in combination with flux rates measured by other science groups will be used to quantify the impact of process and parameter generalization in terms of model bias at each level of the hierarchy, and the scaling behavior of flux processes computed over the range of parameter resolutions we will sample. We hypothesize that the spatial patterns of surface/atmosphere flux is strongly influenced by the distribution of available soil moisture and inundation areas in the study sites, which, in conjunction with disturbance regime, may provide a key organizing framework for scaling stand to regional simulations. We will develop surface parameter sets for the models with a combination of field measurement of hydrologic processes, remotely sensed canopy information and laser and radar altimetry. This effort will collaborate with HYD-7.

TE-21 Data Sets