Drylands in the Earth System: A Community Discussion for Field Campaigns and Emerging Remote Sensing Tools

Over the past decade, a diversity of emerging research has shown that drylands play a critical role in Earth’s climate via their control over biogeochemical cycles and energy balance. Covering almost 50% of the global land surface, drylands display remarkable sensitivity to disturbance, climate extremes, and increasing atmospheric CO₂concentrations. New hyperspectral, LiDAR, and radar satellite missions now provide the opportunity to scale measurements made in situ to landscapes, regions, and the planet, with operational and planned NASA missions providing novel data at the relatively high-spatial resolutions needed for heterogeneous vegetation systems such as drylands (e.g., EMIT, ECOSTRESS, GEDI, SWOT, OCO-3, NISAR, SBG and Landsat-NEXT). This Town Hall will feature a discussion on dryland science, seeking community perspectives on science needs and best approaches for a multi-scale field campaign that vasty improves our understanding and capacity to model our planet’s drylands in the context of climate impacts, mitigation and adaptation potential, and decision-making opportunities for sustaining the Earth system and society. We hope to cover numerous ways of assessing drylands, including in situ observations and experiments, remote sensing tools, and modeling.   


Group Name: ARID (Adaptation and Response in Drylands) Research Team