Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE) Tropics Phase 2 Overview
Authors
Jeffrey Chambers1,8* (jchambers@lbl.gov), Stuart Davies2, Kolby Jardine1, Michael Keller3, Charles Koven1, Lara Kueppers1, Ruby Leung4, Nate McDowell4, Gilberto Pastorello1, Alistair Rogers5, Anthony Walker6, Jeff Warren6, Chonggang Xu7, NGEE Tropics team
Institutions
1Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA; 2Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Washington, DC; 3USDA Forest Service, Washington, DC; 4Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA; 5Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY; 6Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN; 7Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM; 8University of California–Berkeley, CA
URLs
Abstract
Tropical forests exchange more carbon dioxide, water, and energy with the atmosphere than any other biome. Yet processes controlling tropical forest–atmosphere interactions that play key roles in regulating Earth’s climate are not well represented in the current generation of Earth system models. In support of BER’s mission to advance a predictive understanding of Earth’s climate and environmental systems, the goal of the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE) Tropics project is a greatly improved predictive understanding of tropical forests and Earth system feedbacks to changing environmental drivers over the 21st century. A strong coupling of modeling and experiment-observational methods (ModEx) is the fundamental approach toward attaining this goal, with a grand deliverable of a representative, process-rich tropical forest ecosystem model (Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator; FATES), where the dynamics and feedbacks of tropical ecosystems in a changing climate are modeled at the scale and resolution of a next-generation Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) grid cell. The current Phase 2 of NGEE Tropics is structured around three Research Focus Areas (RFAs) that will advance understanding and model representation of tropical forest processes at individual (RFA1), community to regional (RFA2), and regional and global (RFA3) scales in E3SM-FATES. Science activities within these RFAs are organized into ModEx Work Packages (WP). This overview will highlight activities that synthesize across RFAs and WPs toward addressing integrative science questions at site to continental scales.