Jessica F. Needham1, Charles D. Koven1, Rosie Fisher2, Ryan Knox1, Gregory Lemieux1, Jennifer Holm1. 1 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA. 2. CICERO Center for international Climate Research, Norway
Topic
‘Land - River - Human’
Project
E3SM
Abstract
Observations from forest plots show important differences in aboveground woody productivity, biomass and turnover of forests across continents, and how these dynamics are changing through time. These patterns are not captured by the current generation of Earth System Models (ESMs) (Koch et al. 2021). We use reduced complexity configurations of
ELM-FATES to calibrate parameters related to forest biophysics and demography.
Our objectives are to:
Compare ELM-FATES with ELM big leaf in Satellite Phenology mode and benchmark albedo and GPP in both.
Compare ELM-FATES simulations to observations of aboveground biomass (AGB), carbon turnover, and size-dependent aboveground woody productivity (AWP) and mortality (AWM) in fixed-biogeography mode.
Reduce known biases in ELM-FATES productivity by testing the Atkin et al. (2017) respiration model.
Calibrate parameters related to demographic rates.
We find that the Atkin respiration model improves CUE globally, but leads to reductions in LAI and a worse fit to size-dependent patterns of AGB, AWP and AWM. Future work will focus on testing alternative vertical scaling schemes of respiration and photosynthesis to improve LAI.
