[Tiimes-extended] 40 minutes until 2pm Seminar: Britt Stephens, FL2-1022

[Terri Cantrell]

Tuesday, 31 March 2009, 2:00 PM
Refreshments 1:45 PM
NCAR-Foothills Laboratory
3450 Mitchell Lane
Bldg 2 Room 1022


Britton Stephens
National Center for Atmospheric Research, RAF
Boulder, CO

One of the largest uncertainties in climate projections, second only to 
what people will do, is what the global carbon cycle will do. The 
increasingly complex and coupled models used to predict feedbacks 
between climate and the world's oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have 
not been rigorously tested against observations. This lack of validation 
is the fault of both models and measurements, as our models often don't 
make predictions on scales that can be measured and measurements often 
don't define properties on scales that can be modeled, but it is also 
the fault of a cultural divide in the community between modelers and 
observationalists who need to work more closely together. After 
discussing these challenges, Stephens will present examples of recent 
and ongoing attempts to compare atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial 
components of global carbon cycle models to observational data, with 
goals of assessing how well they represent current fluxes and how well 
they represent the key processes and drivers that will influence their 
predictions of climate feedbacks. The examples will include recent 
global airborne CO_2 observations, which in comparison to TransCom3 
inverse model predictions suggest a major revision to the latitudinal 
partitioning of terrestrial carbon fluxes, and a new project to examine 
atmospheric O_2 and CO_2 data to test model predictions of Southern 
Ocean biogeochemical and dynamic processes.

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Terri A. Cantrell
303-497-8281

http://www.tiimes.ucar.edu
Acting Administrator


NCAR
The Institute for Integrative & Multidisciplinary Earth Studies (TIIMES)
P.O. Box 3000
FL1-2024
Boulder, CO 80307-3000

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