ICCDDCC8 Dioxide, Other Greenhouse Gases, and …...Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena, Germany Martin Heimann [email protected] 15th WMO/IAEA Meeting of Experts

Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry

Jena, Germany

Martin [email protected]

15th WMO/IAEA Meeting of Experts on Carbon

Dioxide, Other Greenhouse Gases, and Related Tracer

Measurement TechniquesSeptember 7-10, 2009

2 0 0 9

September 13-19

Jena, Germany

8th International

Carbon Dioxide

Conference

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Welcome !

Jena Climate Observations 1813 - today

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Annual Temperature Anomaly w.r. 1960-1990

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1749 - 1832

Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in JenaFact Sheet

• Founded in 1997, Carl-Zeiss factory, since 10/2002 in own building on Beutenberg

• An institute of the independent, non-profit research organization Max-Planck-Society for the Advancement of Science (~80 institutes nationwide)

• Three research departments

• 10 central research and technical service facilities

• Staff: 162, of which 54 scientists and 34 PhD students

• Annual turnover: ~10 M€, of which about 20% from 3rd party

MPI for Biogeochemistry:Overarching research questions

• What are the key processes controlling biogeochemical fluxes?

• How can we scale up and quantify non-linear biogeochemical process information from points to regions, continents and the globe?

• What is the role of biodiversity?

• Can we quantify and model the feedbacks between the physical climate system and biogeochemistry?

• Human interactions: how does land use and management change the system behavior?

Earth Systerm Research Partnership: MPI for Meteorology (Hamburg) - Physical climate system, ES modeling MPI for Chemistry (Mainz) - Reactive chemistry and aerosols MPI for Biogeochemistry (Jena) - Global biogeochemical cycles Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) - Human interactions

Institute Strategy and Structure

Process studies (in situ, experiment)Dept. of Biogeochemical Processes

Susan Trumbore

Regional and global observationsDep.t of Biogeochemical Systems

Martin Heimann

Biogeochemical Model-Data IntegrationMarkus Reichstein

Biospheric Theory and ModelingAxel Kleidon

Organismic BiogeochemistryChristian Wirth

Terrestrial ecosystems – plants, animals, and soils - interact with atmospheric composition and climate. During the last centuries, humans have increasingly modified the land surface, fundamentally altering ecosystems and the rates at which energy, water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycle through them. !e impact of these changes contributes to climate change and a"ects soil fertility, water availability, and air and water quality. In the Department of Biogeo-chemical Processes, we study the basic science of how ecosystems process energy, water and ele-ments – and how past climatic and human land use changes like deforestation and agriculture have altered those functions with global conse-quences. !is research explores basic properties of ecosystems and ecology, and informs future land management strategies.

Quantifying feedbacks in complex and coupled systems requires a range of tools and approaches.

In the field, we measure the exchange of gases like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide between the land and atmosphere and document how those fluxes vary with climate and the di-versity of plant or microbial community compo-sition. Studies of fluxes along spatial gradients in ecosystem properties, for example, tempera-ture gradients associated with elevation, allow us to document relationships between climate and ecosystem fluxes that evolve over longer time scales. Laboratory and field experiments manipulate individual factors such as tempera-ture, biodiversity or nutrient availability in order to document how di"erent components of the ecosystem respond to environmental conditions, and how these combine to create the whole ecosystem patterns of response. We develop new analytical tools using isotopes or other trac-ers that allow us to evaluate the importance of processes across a range of spatial and temporal scales.

Department of

Biogeochemical Processes

Biogeochemical processes are the actions that transform and distribute the elements essential

to life among the atmosphere, biosphere, land and oceans. In the Department of Biogeochemi-

cal Processes we develop and apply experimental and analytical tools to quantify the rates,

global importance , and climate feedbacks for key processes governing the exchange of carbon,

oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous between ecosystems and the atmosphere.

Portrait of the Director

Susan Trumbore will assume Directorship of the Department of Biogeochemical Processes in October, 2009. Trumbore comes to MPI-BGC from the University of California, Irvine, where she is a Professor in Earth System Science. Trumbo-re’s expertise is in applying isotopes to quantify and trace processes controlling the exchange of greenhouse gases between the atmosphere, terrestrial plants and soils, especially using radiocarbon to determine the timescales of organic matter cycling and stabilization in soil. contact: [email protected]

Many of the global biogeochemical cycles are reflected in the atmosphere by one or several trace gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) or also aerosols. Spatio-temporal variations of these tracers (and other quantities linked to them such as their isotopic composition) contain important infor-mation on location, magnitude and temporal variability of the various source and sink processes of the species of interest. !e atmosphere thereby is used as a natural “integrator” of the complex pattern of surface fluxes because of the rapid mix-ing of air. Atmospheric measurements may thus be used to observe surface processes on a range of spatial and temporal scales, from a small-scale regional ecosystem to entire continents and the globe. !ereby atmospheric transport by winds and mixing has to be taken into account by us-ing three-dimensional numerical meteorological models in an inversion or data assimilation mode. In the Department of Biogeochemical Systems we

develop and apply this “top-down approach” in four focus areas:

Focus area 1: Expansion of the atmospheric network of in situ measurements of high-accu-racy biogeochemical trace species. !e current global atmospheric network for biogeochemical trace gases contains many gaps in important areas. An e"ort therefore is directed at the establishment of new measuring stations in undersampled locations, which constitute “hot-spots” in the Earth system. Geographically we pursue this along three directions: (1) A string of tall towers from Europe into the Eurasian taiga at 60°N including the new 300m high measurement mast in central Siberia (ZOTTO, Figure 1). (2) A line of stations along the eastern Atlantic Ocean on remote islands and coasts (e.g. Shetland, Cape Verde, Namibia) for monitoring oceanic processes and air leaving the African continent. (3) Jointly with the MPI for Chemistry in Mainz

Department of

Biogeochemical Systems

Biogeochemical cycles are represented in the atmosphere by several important greenhouse gases,

such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. In the Department of Biogeochemical Systems

we develop methods to measure these gases in situ and by remote sensing, we expand the mea-

surement network to remote hot-spot regions such as Siberia and Amazonia, and we develop and

apply numerical models to quantify the large-scale sources and sinks of the greenhouse gases.

Portrait of the Director

Martin Heimann is director of the Department of Biogeochemical Systems at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry since 2004. He is a member of the Max-Planck-Society, honorary professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, and elected member of the Academia Europaea. Over the last three decades Martin Heimann has worked on analyzing and modeling the global carbon cycle and its interaction with the physical climate system. contact: martin. [email protected]

!e current debate about “global change” mostly emphasises the greenhouse e"ect, the associated warming of the atmosphere and the feedback through the carbon cycle. However, the Earth is much more complex. For a comprehensive understanding of the Earth system the interac-tion of the carbon cycle with water and nutrient cycles and the role of vegetation-soil feedbacks have to be addressed much more thoroughly. Hence the Biogeochemical Model-Data In-tegration Group (BGC-MDI) is dedicated to develop new methods and models capable of better diagnosing the state and dynamics of the terrestrial biosphere. !is should allow to better reconstruct as well as predict the Ecosys-tems’ behaviour under di"erent past and future environmental conditions. MDI-BGC forms part of various international research projects on continental scale carbon cycle and greenhouse gas analysis and Earth System modelling. Addi-tionally, the group coordinates the FP7-funded

project CARBO-Extreme: studying the impacts of climate variability and weather extremes as well as the response of soil carbon to increasing temperature on global warming (www.carbo-extreme.eu).!e BGC-MDI group is conceptually divided into three strongly interacting and complemen-tary focus groups:I. Empirical inference and global modelling of

biosphere-atmosphere interactions. II. Process-based modelling of the soil in the

Earth system.III. Development of model-data integration

methodologies.

I. Empirical inference and global modelling of biosphere-atmosphere interactions !e goal is to extract relevant empirical infor-mation on biosphere-atmosphere interactions from the vast and highly multivariate global Earth Observation data sources. A very chal-

Max Planck Research Group

Biogeochemical Model-Data Integration

The Biogeochemical Model-Data Integration group aims to better represent global climate-soil-

vegetation interactions, to recognize the current state of the global terrestrial biosphere as well

as predict the Ecosystems’ behaviour under different past and future environmental conditions

by developing new modelling and model-data integration approaches.

Portrait of the Group Leader

Markus Reichstein studied Landscape Ecology with minor subjects Chemistry, Botany and Computer science at the University of Münster. He carried out his PhD thesis on “Drought e!ects on carbon and water exchange in three Mediter-ranean ecosystems” at the University of Bayreuth. With a Marie-Curie fellow-ship he worked at the University of Tuscia, Viterbo Italy, with interspersed stays at the Universities of Montana, Missoula, and California, Berkeley. In 2006 he established the Biogeochemical Model-Data Integration Group in Jena.

contact: [email protected]

BGC-MDI

Stu! mixes, water flows downhill and wood burns into ashes. In the absence of other processes, sooner or later all matter would be uniformly mixed. Water would collect in the world‘s oceans, mountains would be eroded down to the seafloor, and wood would be burnt to ashes. "ese processes would transform the distribution of geochemical elements into a „dead“ Earth state, with no gradients present to drive fluxes that result in global cycles of geo-chemical elements and no free energy would be available to “run” life.

"ese seemingly trivial observations highlight an underlying general direction into which any process in the Earth system evolves in time. "e examples describe processes that cannot be un-done, or, technically speaking, they are irrevers-ible. "is direction is understood and quantified in general terms using the fundamental physi-cal theory of thermodynamics, and applies to

all geochemical processes and global cycles of Earth as well as life itself.

What is it about the planet Earth which allows it to be maintained so far away from the final, „dead“ state of thermodynamic equilibrium? Which processes perform the physical and chemical work that separates matter, moves wa-ter uphill, forms mountains, and produces wood out of ashes? What role does life and its inher-ent diversity play in driving the Earth’s state far from equilibrium? And when we consider hu-man activities and associated global change, do these bring the Earth system closer to or further away from the „dead“ state of thermodynamic equilibrium?

"e research of the “Biospheric "eory and Modelling” group addresses these questions based on a holistic perspective of how the ther-modynamic Earth system works. "e research

Max Planck Research Group

Biospheric Theory and Modelling

We develop and use theoretical approaches and numerical simulation models to investigate the

role of the biota in driving the global geochemical cycles within the Earth system. We use these

models to reproduce and explain the observed geographic variation of terrestrial vegetation,

fluxes of energy, water, carbon, and other elements for the present-day, Earth’s past evolution

and evaluate the consequences of human actions.

Portrait of the Group Leader

Axel Kleidon studied physics, mathematics and meteorology at the University of Hamburg and Purdue University, Indiana, USA. Ph.D. in meteorology, Univ. Hamburg (1998), Postdoctoral scientist, Stanford Univ. (1998-2000), Assistant Professor, Univ. Maryland (2001-2006), Leader, independent junior research group (since 2006). Research interests: atmosphere-biosphere interac-tions, biodiversity, vegetation modelling, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, Gaia hypothesis, Earth system evolution.

contact: [email protected]

BGC-Theory

Every day up to 130 biological species go extinct on our planet. At the same time, human activity promotes the spread of alien species across the globe. How are ecosystems influenced by the loss or addition of species? How does the presence or absence of particular species or functional groups a!ect biogeochemistry? How are these e!ects mediated or even aggravated by climate-driven shifts in disturbance regimes? To address these questions the group ‘Organismic Biogeochem-istry’ closely collaborates with the biodiversity and earth system modeling community and we also carry out field work in Siberia, China, and Germany. "e work of three focus groups shows that species diversity and identity may influence matter cycles and vegetation dynamics at scales relevant for global climate change.

Focus 1: Plant functional diversity in earth system models Plant traits, like photosynthetic capacity, maxi-

mum height, or rooting depth are key features to understand the distribution and migration of plants, their interaction with competitors and their impact on ecosystem functions. Many earth system models employ plant traits as pa-rameters, but modelers are still far from fully ex-ploiting the wealth of available information. We connect the respective scientific communities with the goal to e#ciently and correctly channel plant ecological information into earth system models. To this end we have developed a novel, generic database structure, which facilitates the consistent compilation of plant traits together with the biotic and environmental variables that influence them. "e FET (Functional Ecology of Trees) database project is focused on tree physiology, community and ecosystem ecology. "e TRY initiative (www.try-db.org, with more than 4 Million entries for over 60,000 plant species) is a communal e!ort to merge existing plant traits databases in one central database

Max Planck Research Group

Organismic Biogeochemistry

The ‘Organismic Biogeochemistry’ (OBG) group explores how species diversity and species

identity influences biogeochemical cycles both at the local and global scale. This involves field

surveys, synthesis of data from diversity experiments, modeling, and compiling and analyzing

global databases of plant traits and ecosystem properties.

Portrait of the Group Leader

Christian Wirth is a plant ecologist by training and received his PhD at the University of Bayreuth. He worked as a postdoc at Jena, Princeton, Fairbanks, and Krasnoyarsk. His main interests: linking species diversity and biogeochemi-cal cycles, vegetation dynamics, disturbance ecology and the functioning of global forest vegetation. With his independent junior research group “Organismic Bio-geochemistry” he thrives to reach a good balance between fieldwork, data analysis and modeling. contact: [email protected]

Dept. of Biogeochemical Integration3 Max-Planck Research Groups

photo: J. Baade

Jena Biodiversity Experiment, Saaleaue

Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in JenaCentral Research Service Facilities

Stable Isotope Facility (W. Brand)

Gas Analytics Facility (A. Jordan)  

14C Analysis Facility (A. Steinhof)

Inorganic Analysis Facility (I. Hilke/M. Raessler)

Field instrumentation Facility (O. Kolle)

Computing, Library, Technical Services, Administration

Enjoy your stay in Jena !

Thank you