Motivation

• For future climate change, strong warming is predicted for high northern latitudes
• Permafrost soils in these regions show enormous carbon reservoirs

► Future warming may destabilize the permafrost carbon pool, leading to important feedbacks with climate change

Investigating Non-Linear Change at Smallest Scales

• Many Arctic landscapes feature smallest-scale structures
• Non-linear disturbance processes triggered by future climate change may create new structures
• Even a minor disturbance can cause substantial shifts in microsite structure, and modify carbon & energy budgets

► Goal: We want to simulate Arctic carbon budgets considering the net impact of disturbances at smallest scales. 

Synergy Concept: 4 Disciplines, 3 Scaling Levels

In-situ observations

• Investigate disturbance sequences with small-scale, process-oriented field work
• Landscape-scale observations with tall eddy-covariance towers
• Emissions from open-water using floating chamber approaches
• Pan-Arctic data syntheses

Regional quantifications

• Use atmospheric inversions to check upscaling, model parameterizations and model evaluation
• “Local” scale (20-200km domain): Support for upscaling from point observations to ESM model grid
• Pan-Arctic scale: regional checks on upscaling and model evaluation

Remote sensing

• Monitoring wetting vs. drying
• Pan-Arctic products to quantify climate change impacts
• New methods to identify sub-surface conditions in the terrestrial Arctic
• Use of SAR/InSAR data to detect e.g. loss of ground ice in active layer at very high resolution

Earth system modeling

• Land-surface model JSBACH, component of ICON-ESM
• Simulate pathway-dependent dynamics of permafrost C-storage
• Close the gap between process-scale and ESM-scale with statistical approaches
• Include disturbance impacts

Key Research Questions

Overcome Methodological Gaps

• The scaling gap between process level and model/satellite grid resolution
• Knowledge gaps regarding net disturbance impacts on carbon and energy budgets
• Gaps in synergy between in-situ data, satellite data and modeling frameworks

Will the Arctic become a corbon source in the future?

• What scales do we need to resolve to capture the relevant processes?
• How will changes in land surface properties influence the budgets of carbon and energy? What will be the impact of e.g.
  • Permafrost degradation, disturbance
  • Shifts in hydrologic conditions
  • Shifts in soil thermal regime, thaw depth

Long-Term Vision

• First step towards an operational monitoring framework focusing on Arctic biogeochemistry
• Pave the way for the exploitation of upcoming data streams