Visit the project website: www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/climate-partnership
The project explores two complementary themes. The first is a better understanding of the impacts of climate change on tropical ecosystems and how ecosystems respond. The second is focused on better predicting the interactions between climate change mitigation interventions and the wider social and economic landscape.
A key result from this project will be information for conservation strategies.
As a partner in the project, ECI focuses on climate and ecosystem responses, trying to answer the following questions:
The Amazon rainforest plays a disproportionately large role both in hosting biodiversity and affecting global earth system functions, including the carbon balance of the planet. But this unique ecosystem is threatened by wildfires, deforestation and changing climate conditions.
As evidence for human influence on global climate becomes ever clearer, it is important to understand how climate change is affecting the functioning and diversity of the Amazon biosphere, as well as the interactions and feedbacks between biosphere change and climate change.
Initially, the focus is on Brazillian Amazonia and research is designed to influence land management decisions (e.g. reforestation).
This project uses the weather@home framework over the South America region at 50km or 25km resolution, with the option of coupling to a dynamic vegetation model.
It also uses the Hadley Center regional model HadRM3P driven by the global model HadAM3P, where HadAM3P provides boundary conditons to HadRM3P.
So far, the investigation of projected extreme rainfall change has not revealed a clear signal. The ecosystem is too complex for current generation of models to resolve certain process, e.g. moisture recycling within the system, and more observation data needs to be collected to improve the models.