Climate change research has a linked system of models of the ocean, atmosphere and land. This talk, presented by Dr Yanyan Cheng and Prof Christine Shoemaker, focuses on the land model used in climate change forecasting. As a main part of the Earth’s vegetation, tropical forests play a critical role in regulating carbon and water cycle dynamics both regionally and globally. The climatic feedbacks from biological systems on earth surface, particularly from the vegetation, are a new focus in the Earth System models (ESMs) development, and these new vegetation models are called ecosystem demographic (ED) models.
The ED models allow the authors to represent the vegetation component more explicitly in ESMs and advance the understanding of vegetation feedbacks to the climate. An overview of the components of the ESMs and the factors influencing interactions between vegetation and climate will be briefly discussed.
The complex ED models are much more computationally expensive, which makes it difficult to calibrate the model parameters against observations. In this study, they propose a calibration framework that uses a parallel surrogate global optimisation algorithm (Xia & Shoemaker, 2021) to compute (at National Supercomputer Center) model parameter values for ED models.
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