Estimating the Impacts of Recent Severe Amazonia Droughts on Forest Carbon Dynamics and Fluxes from Assimilating Satellite Observations in NCAR CESM with Ensemble Kalman Filter

Junjie Liu, JPL, junjie.liu@jpl.nasa.gov (Presenter)
Sassan Saatchi, CALTECH/JPL, sasan.s.saatchi@jpl.nasa.gov
Yifan Yu, UCLA, yifan@atmos.ucla.edu
Kevin W Bowman, JPL, kevin.w.bowman@jpl.nasa.gov
Meemong Lee, JPL, meemong.lee@jpl.nasa.gov

In the past decade, Amazonia has experienced two major droughts, which occurred in 2005 and 2010 respectively. The simulation of the drought impact on the carbon dynamics by carbon climate models still has large uncertainty, which significantly affect the ability of these models to do climate projections. Unlike optical satellites (e.g., MODIS) monitoring vegetation greenness, QSCAT backscatter signal is not affected by clouds and atmospheric aerosols. QSCAT backscatter measurements capture biophysical properties of forests, such as canopy structure. In this study, we evaluate the Community Earth System Model (CESM) in simulating the drought impact on Amazonia carbon dynamic with satellite observations from QSCAT. We will show preliminary results of assimilating the above ground biomass (AGB) derived from QSCAT in CESM to constrain carbon state variables. Using the net carbon fluxes simulated by CESM as the prior fluxes in atmospheric inversion, we will discuss the consistency between top-down flux inversion and bottom-up estimates from models, and identify the physical processes that are possibly contribute to the inconstancy between the top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  General Contributions   (Tue 4:35 PM)

Associated Project(s): 

• Liu, Junjie: An integrated carbon data assimilation system to advance understanding and predictions of the carbon cycle ...details
• Liu, Junjie: Estimating the Impacts of Recent Severe Amazonia Droughts on Forest Carbon Dynamics and Fluxes From Assimilating Satellite Observations in NCAR CESM With Ensemble Kalman Filter ...details

Poster Location ID: 194