The project will further develop and test improved representations of vegetation processes, including the dynamics of vegetation change, within numerical models of the earth system. The principal investigator will continue to collaborate with scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to advance work on the interactive vegetation component as it progresses towards becoming an integral part of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). A series of simulations are planned starting with offline land-vegetation simulations, coupled climate model-fixed vegetation simulations, multi-century pre-industrial coupled simulation, a long mid-Holocene simulation, and a transient global warming integration.
The issues raised in this project have application outside these purely modeling efforts. The final product of this work will be a sophisticated representation of terrestrial processes within the CCSM, and freely available to other users, with important implications for our understanding of current and future climate patterns and changes. Societal benefits from improved understanding of current anthropogenic impacts are far-reaching.
