Name
B5 Land-atmosphere fluxes and feedbacks to climate change (Joint session with Hydrology)
Description

Climate change impacts terrestrial vegetation causing important changes to carbon, water, and energy cycles, which in turn feed back to the global climate system. In order to adapt to future climate change, we must understand the response and coupling of terrestrial carbon, water, and energy cycles with a warmer and more variable climate, and the role therein of increased atmospheric CO2 concentration, intensified disturbances, accelerated nutrient cycling, and land use and land cover change. It is also important that we quantify the impact of these processes in critical ecosystems including boreal forests, tundra, peatlands, and drylands. Process-based land surface and Earth system models, atmospheric inversions, in situ and remote sensing observations, inventory-based estimates, and other data-driven approaches are powerful tools for approaching these problems. This session will showcase research focused on improving our understanding of the Canadian and global terrestrial carbon, water, and energy cycles, and their role in the climate/Earth System. We welcome submissions providing insight into how best to quantify these processes and their variability via observations, represent them in land surface and global models of varying complexity, and understand their interactions with the rest of the Earth System, from groundwater to the atmosphere. We especially encourage submissions that bridge modelling and empirical approaches with novel techniques.

Convenors
Sian Kou-Giesbrecht / Alexis Berg, Simon Fraser University / Universite de Montreal, Natasha MacBean, Oliver Sonnentag
Joint Session With
Hydrology