NOAA/GFDL Earth System Model’s Land Component Development and Applications

Seminar by Dr. Minjin Lee from NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

19 December 2024
KST 14:00 – 16:00

The Seminar is being held in Room 1010 (Jasmin) – Integrated mechanical engineering building. Click here for the campus map.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) Earth System Model (ESM)’s land component is designed to capture coupled water, energy, carbon, and/or nutrient dynamics within vegetation, soils, rivers, and lakes. The standalone Land Model (LM) has evolved in different versions over the last decades, with applications to problems of direct relevance to society.

I will begin by describing the structure and applications of LM3-Terrestrial and Aquatic Nitrogen (TAN) at regional (e.g., Susquehanna and Mississippi River Basins, South Korea) to global scales. LM3-TAN has been used to explore the combined effects of terrestrial and climate perturbations (e.g., increasing land use, fertilizer applications, atmospheric CO2, and climate variability/extremes) on ocean and atmosphere pollution, and provided important implications for emerging environmental problems and effective mitigation strategies.

In the second part of this talk, the development of a global, spatially explicit, process-based model, Freshwater Algae, Nutrient, and Solid Cycling and Yields (FANSY), will be discussed. FANSY is intended as a baseline for eventual linking of global terrestrial and ocean biogeochemistry in next generation Earth System Models to project global changes that may challenge empirical approaches. LM3-FANSY dynamically simulates suspended solids, nitrogen, and phosphorus in multiple forms (particulate/dissolved, organic/inorganic) and multiple units (yield, load, and concentration) across a globally distributed set of large rivers and in global amounts, with an accuracy comparable to other global freshwater nutrient and suspended solid models.

Finally, I will discuss the recent development of the new soil biogeochemistry model, Global Integrated Microbial Interactions with Carbon in Soil (GIMICS). GIMICS incorporates equations demonstrating the microbial physiology and soil physiochemical principles of the MIcrobial-MIneral Carbon Stabilization model (MIMICS) separately for the bulk soil and rhizosphere. GIMICS represents dynamics of microbes and carbon in litter and vertically resolved soil columns and their interactions with plants, accounting for the effects of changes in temperature and water availability. In addition, GIMICS captures redistribution and transport of carbon through bioturbation, diffusion, advection, and runoff to rivers. GIMICS has been integrated with the NOAA/GFDL LM4.2 which includes dynamic vegetation and wildfire. This new development effort is aimed at resolving shortcomings of the first-generation soil biogeochemistry models (e.g., CENTURY) which are included in most current Earth System Models. The first-generation soil biogeochemistry models have been criticized for their first-order kinetics that do not properly represent processes of soil organic matter decomposition and stabilization in response to changing climate.