Unravel the Puzzle of Arctic Vegetation-Climate Interactions in the Earth System Model

Webinar Format: Zoom
Access Information Here

Speaker: Dr. Hui Tang, University of Oslo

Abstract:

Vegetation plays an important role in the Arctic climate change and has been recognized as a tipping element in our earth system. Describing the fully coupled vegetation-climate system in Earth System Models (ESM), however, remains challenging. Strong run-away effects (i.e., excessively positive feedback of vegetation) has been found over the Arctic region when a global dynamic vegetation model is coupled with an atmosphere model. So far, all the ESMs involved in CMIP6 have not been coupled to global dynamic vegetation models even though they have been implemented in the ESMs. In this talk, I will present our work done under the LATICE and EMERALD projects to unravel the big puzzle of Arctic vegetation-climate interactions in the ESMs. I will focus on three main aspects of the problem in the ESM: (1) how to better represent vegetation dynamics especially vegetation cover changes in response to climate changes over the Arctic, (2) how to better constrain the strength of vegetation-climate feedbacks in the Arctic, and (3) how to address the bottleneck of observation data for developing the model.