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Organized Oral Session

Session: : Eddy Covariance Towers as Ecological Research Tools

OOS 43-4 - Predicting life in the Earth system: Linking ecological observations with modeling tools

Wednesday, August 9, 2023
2:15 PM – 2:30 PM PDT
Location: 256
Terrestrial ecosystems help to regulate climate through governing the exchange of energy, water, and greenhouse gases between Earth’s land surface and atmosphere. However, our understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems contribute to and mitigate climate change is limited in part due to methodological challenges. Here, we present a new tool that integrates eddy covariance flux tower measurements and an ecological model to advance macroscale ecology, build scientific understanding of the Earth as a coupled system, and help to reduce disciplinary silos.

The novel NCAR-NEON tool uses observations from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to run the Community Land Model (CLM), the land component of the Community Earth System Model (CESM), enabling near real time terrestrial ecosystem modeling at NEON sites. Specifically, the tool incorporates gap-filled flux tower meteorology and site-level characteristics from the NEON observatory into the CESM-Lab, a containerized modeling system, and provides a simplified workflow to run CLM simulations for NEON sites on a laptop. The NCAR-NEON tool also includes sample analysis scripts that facilitate comparing CLM simulations with NEON observations. We highlight how the CLM simulations at NEON towers provide data to help constrain processes, augment available measurements, and test hypotheses of ecosystem-atmosphere coupling. This tool will enable new scientific discovery and innovation across ecology and geoscience communities.