This award funds the activities of the Global Analysis, Integration, and Modelling Task Force (GAIM) Office of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP). The goal of GAIM is to advance the study of the coupled dynamics of the Earth system using data and models. The challenge of the GAIM office, housed at the University of New Hampshire, is to initiate and facilitate activities that will lead to the rapid development and application of a suite of Global Prognostic Biogeochemical Models.
A major new focus for the next three years of GAIM activities will be to enhance the scientific community's capability to address the Earth system as a whole using model coupling and integration. The first challenge will be to coordinate the development of Earth-system Models of Intermediate Complexity (EMICs) by research groups throughout the world. These models show great promise for highlighting critical feedbacks and interactions that control the stability and sensitivity of the Earth system to anthropogenic perturbations. Next, models with system-level integration will be developed that integrate full-complexity subsystem models into Comprehensive Earth System models. Such models pose a different set of challenges to researchers in terms of space, time scale, and boundary conditions.
