In this project researchers will perform a synthesis motivated by findings at individual flux tower sites that extreme weather and climate events (e.g., droughts, floods, hurricanes, and ice-storms) lead to pronounced and protracted anomalies in key components of the measured local carbon and water budgets. The PIs will assess the degree of commonality across flux tower sites in the response of the ecosystem to extreme events, derive a coherent description of these responses, and use remote sensing data to extrapolate spatially coherent and persistent impacts on ecosystems, specifically on vegetation, that subsequently may impact carbon and water balances and climate trajectories on a larger spatial scale. The PIs will also assess the ability of land surface models spanning a wide range of complexity to simulate the observed response of terrestrial state variables and fluxes to extreme events when driven by observed meteorology. The project is composed entirely of a team of early-career scientists.
This work is supported under the NSF Carbon and Water in the Earth System solicitation, an interdisciplinary funding opportunity from the Directorate of Geosciences.
