Enabling real time scientific discovery by connecting measurements from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with models from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

Abstract:

The deployment of increasingly sophisticated terrestrial observing systems has been critical to the development of land models that simulate Earth’s ecological systems. The integration of measurement and models can accelerate scientific discovery, especially when stakeholders with diverse scientific backgrounds are engaged in data collection, integration, and analysis through an open and iterative process. Building the communities and workflows to facilitate this kind of integration, however, continues to be challenging across the Biogeosciences. Here, we report on progress to integrate diverse datastreams collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) with modeling capabilities developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and university partners. Specifically, NEON data are integrated into the Community Land Model (CLM) with the aim of testing hypotheses in atmospheric science and macroscale ecology to increase our understanding of the biosphere-atmosphere system and its response to global environmental change.

Preliminary work at a handful of NEON tower sites illustrates that we can use meteorological data from NEON flux tower to reasonably simulate water, energy and carbon fluxes with CLM. Moreover, we illustrate how NCAR modeling can generate hypotheses about when site and domain-level changes in ecosystem function may be detected against the background of internal variability in the climate system. Building on these results, we aim to enable an automated, cloud-based framework for scalable, near real-time research with CLM that uses NEON data. Moreover, NEON observations include manual measurements, automated sensors, and airborne observations that span from deep soils to the top of the vegetated canopy. Additional work is required to investigate how these data products can inform model initialization, validation, and evaluation. We invite university collaborators to contribute this effort by using NCAR models and NEON data for their own research questions in atmospheric science and macroscale ecology.