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The Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) welcomed Paula Bontempi (NASA) as co-chair of the group at their January 4 meeting. Bontempi replaces Roger Dahlman (Department of Energy), who had served as co-chair since 2002. Dahlman will remain on the CCIWG as the representative from DOE. Two other members of the CCIWG stepped down from their positions as agency representatives to the group, effective at the January 4 meeting: Fred Lipschultz (National Science Foundation) and David Hoffman (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pleased to announce the publication of an updated "Guide to Best Practices for Ocean CO2 Measurements," edited by Andrew Dickson, Chris Sabine, and Jim Christian. The Guide is a revised and updated version of the 1994 Department of Energy "Handbook of Methods for the Analysis of the Various Parameters of the Carbon Dioxide System in Seawater." To download a pdf version of the Handbook or to order a hard copy, please visit the CDIAC Ocean CO2 site.
Ocean
Acidification: Towards an
Interagency Approach, part of the 2008 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Orlando, FL
Tuesday, March 4, 2008, 7:30 to
9:30 pm
For more information, contact Libby Jewett, Libby.Jewett@noaa.gov
Ocean acidification, or the reduction in global oceanic pH caused by
rising dissolved CO2 concentrations, is a rapidly emerging issue that
has garnered considerable interest from Congress, the scientific
community, and coastal managers. Over the next century, ocean
acidification is expected to reduce surface ocean pH by 0.3 0.5 units,
negatively impacting shell formation for a number of marine organisms
and ultimately affecting some of the most fundamental biological and
geochemical processes of the sea. In response, a number of US federal
agencies (e.g., NOAA, NSF, USGS, NASA) are developing programs to
address this critical issue. This town hall forum will be an
opportunity for representatives of agencies that support marine
research and academic researchers to discuss a vision for a national interagency program on ocean acidification.
Advancing the ocean acidification state-of-knowledge demands a broad
range of research, monitoring, and modeling capabilities. Some of
these capabilities may be better suited to the mission areas of
different agencies. Through cross-agency and international
coordination, we can achieve greater efficiency, leverage funding,
avoid duplicative efforts, and allow for large-scale joint funding
initiatives. Key topics of discussion will be the recent interagency
workshop report titled, Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Coral Reefs
and Other Marine Calcifiers: A Guide for Future Research and emerging
international ocean acidification programs with the European Union
(EU), Japan, and Korea.
The North American Carbon Program Scientific Steering Group (NACP SSG) will welcome Kenneth Davis (Pennsylvania State University) and Anthony King (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) to two-year terms as co-chairs at its February 5-6 meeting. Current chair Scott Denning (Colorado State University) will remain on the NACP SSG as past-chair.
The 2008 OCB Summer Science Workshop will take place July 21-24, 2008 in Woods Hole, MA. The focus of this year's workshop is on the following interdisciplinary themes:
Each day will focus on one theme, which will include a morning plenary session, followed by afternoon breakout sessions on more detailed sub-topics within that theme, and then a late afternoon poster session. The purpose of the breakouts is to facilitate more detailed discussions on research priorities and opportunities within each theme. A set of near- and long-term objectives will be developed, from which the OCB research community could begin to formulate ideas for single or multi-PI projects to advance the field.
Registration for the workshop is available at http://www.whoi.edu/sites/ocbworkshop2008. The registration deadline is June 10, 2008.
The Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Program is soliciting ideas for targeted workshops to promote collaborative research at the interface of ecosystem dynamics and marine biogeochemical cycles. In addition to annual summer science meetings that focus on broader interdisciplinary themes, OCB will convene targeted scoping workshops to give the research community a public venue for discussing research challenges and implementation approaches to address specific OCB research priorities. More information is available from the call for proposals.
The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) data base (Version 1.0) (Takahashi et al 2007) is now available for general public use through Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) web page: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/oceans/LDEO_Underway_Database/LDEO_home.html. More than 3 million measurements of surface water partial pressure of CO2 obtained over the global oceans during 1968 - 2006 are listed in the LDEO database, which includes open ocean and coastal water measurements. The data have been quality-controlled based on the stability of the system performance, the reliability of calibrations for CO2 analysis, and the internal consistency of data. In addition, to allow re-examination of the data in the future, a number of measured parameters relevant to pCO2 measurements are listed. The data presented in this database include the analysis of partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2), sea surface temperature (SST), sea surface salinity (SSS), pressure of the equilibration, and barometric pressure in the outside air from the ship's observation system.
The first issue of OCB News is now available from the OCB Project Office website. The newsletter highlights science, education & outreach, program updates, and OCB-related activities.
The Global Carbon Project (GCP) of the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) recently released a report entitled Carbon Reductions and Offsets, exploring voluntary reductions in carbon emissions via efficiency, emission avoidance, and offsetting. The decision making framework and conclusions are drawn from a case study of the ESSP, where travel, conferences, and office support are the major sources of carbon emissions, although the conclusions are also relevant for other programs and research institutions.
The Vulcan Project is a NASA/DOE funded effort under the North American Carbon Program (NACP) to quantify North American fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at space and time scales much finer than has been achieved in the past. The purpose is to aid in quantification of the North American carbon budget, to support inverse estimation of carbon sources and sinks, and to support the demands posed by the launch of the Orbital Carbon Observatory (OCO) scheduled for 2008/2009. Data are freely available to scientists and the public from www.purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan. More information is available from the Purdue University press release describing the project and from a YouTube video showing maps generated using the Vulcan model.
The National Institute for Marine Sciences and Coastal Management in Algiers, Algeria is currently seeking abstracts for oral and poster presentations at CIEM 2008: Anthropogenic impacts on the marine environment. The Congress will address a number of specific topics related to anthropogenic and climate change impacts on marine and coastal systems and marine biodiversity. Abstracts are due May 30, 2008 and the conference is scheduled for October 27-29, 2008. More information is available in the meeting announcement.
This site (http://carbontracker.noaa.gov), which already has value to scientists, will become increasingly useful for various elements of society in their efforts to track how well they are managing carbon. Increased observations at any atmospheric level, but especially in the boundary layer, will go a long way toward reducing uncertainties, improving regional estimates, and allowing for smaller and smaller "regions."
The report is scheduled for release in Spring 2007. Check the SOCCR website for more information.
You can now submit carbon cycle science-related news, events, and funding opportunities to be posted on the Carbon Cycle Science Program website using our online forms.
The Carbon Cycle Scientific Steering Group (CCSSG) will welcome Richard Birdsey (USDA Forest Service) to a two-year term as chair at its May 31-June 1 meeting. Current chair James Yoder (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) will remain on the CCSSG as past-chair. The CCSSG also welcomes seven new members: Nicholas Bates (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences), Michael Behrenfeld (Oregon State University), Jae Edmonds (Joint Global Change Research Institute), Eric Kasischke (University of Maryland), Ariel Lugo (USDA Forest Service), Peter Raymond (Yale University), and William Schlesinger (Institute for Ecosystem Studies). Completing their terms of service on the CCSSG are: Phil Robertson (Michigan State University), Greg Asner (Carnegie Institution), Linda Joyce (USDA Forest Service), Charles McClain (NASA), John Reilly (Massachusetts Insitute of Technology), Steve Running (University of Montana), Jorge Sarmiento (Yale University), Sue Trumbore (University of California - Irvine), and Thomas Wilbanks (Oak Ridge National Laboratory).
The Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) will bid good-bye to Edwin Sheffner (NASA) at its May 18 meeting. Sheffner is a long-serving member of CCIWG and has been a co-chair since 2006.
Testimony from the May 10th hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard is now available online from the subcommittee's website. Two of the witnesses, Scott Doney (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) and Richard Feely (NOAA), are members of both the Carbon Cycle Scientific Steering Group and Ocean Carbon and Climate Change Scientific Steering Group.
The Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) welcomed Patricia Jellison (USGS) as co-chair of the group at their June 8 meeting. Jellison replaces Edwin Sheffner (NASA), who had served as co-chair since 2006.
Diane Wickland (NASA), a member of the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG), was presented with the American Geophysical Union's Edward A. Flinn III Award at the AGU's spring meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. The award recognizes "unsung heroes" for facilitating, coordinating, and implementing activities that strengthen research. More information is available in this NASA press release.
Bev Law, a member of both the Carbon Cycle Scientific Steering Group and the North American Carbon Program Scientific Steering Group, discussed linkages between US, Italian, and European Union carbon cycle science initiatives at a June 18th meeting between representatives from the US and Italy. A copy of Law's presentation can be found here.
On July 17-19 in Orlando, FL, NASA will convene a workshop on the science of DESDynI, a mission recommended by the National Research Council’s Decadal Study Report, Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11820). NASA intends this meeting to be the first in a series of workshops and activities to involve the community in the refinement of the DESDynI mission and to thereby ensure optimal return to science and society. Those interested in attending the workshop must register at http://www.tisconferences.com/desdynl. There is no registration fee. More information is available in the workshop announcement.
Members of the Carbon Cycle Scientific Steering Group, the North American Carbon Program Scientific Steering Group, and the Ocean Carbon and Climate Change Scientific Steering Group have recently published meeting summaries and program updates in Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union:
A number of Special Sessions related to carbon cycle research will be held at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (December 10-14, 2007 in San Francisco, CA).
B31: Observing, Modeling, and Predicting Regional Scale Carbon Exchange. Obtaining optimal estimates of carbon exchange between the surface and the atmosphere at regional, continental, or ocean-basin scales, intermediate between local and global, remains a scientific challenge. There is a considerable amount of ongoing work to observe and analyze terrestrial and oceanic carbon exchange, aided in part by sustained research programs such as the North American Carbon Program, CarboEurope, and others. As research efforts targeting intermediate scales advance, aspects of the carbon exchange problem unique to the regional scale are emerging and just beginning to be addressed.
This session builds on a successful series conducted over the last few years at the AGU Fall Meeting. We invite contributions describing new terrestrial, oceanic, or atmospheric observations targeting regional or continental scale carbon exchanges, forward modeling efforts seeking to inventory or quantify them, and inverse modeling studies invoking various techniques to optimize estimates of carbon exchange. Presentations which comprehensively analyze data collected during recent integrated field campaigns (e.g. the mid-continent intensive) are encouraged, as are any studies that develop predictive capability for regional carbon exchange in addition to diagnostic capability.
Sub-sessions will consider, but are not limited to, i) inverse studies of tower and aircraft data ii) terrestrial bottom-up inventories ii) coastal carbon dynamics iv) oceanic regional carbon exchange v) model-data fusion vi) geographic focus (e.g. Mexico). However, we especially welcome studies that cut across the usual disciplinary boundaries of the regional carbon exchange problem—e.g. “top-down” and “bottom-up,” terrestrial and oceanic, biogenic and anthropogenic—and geographic boundaries.
B34: The Role of Climate, Carbon and Limiting Nutrient Cycles, and Human Activities in Terrestrial Ecosystems. Assessment of simulations to date with coupled carbon cycle-climate models show that carbon cycle feedbacks to climate change could significantly alter the rate of atmospheric CO2 concentration increase and climate change over the next hundred years. Nevertheless, the terrestrial carbon cycle is not only directly altered by increasing atmospheric CO2 and climate change; it is also indirectly altered by feedbacks from potentially limiting nutrient cycle (e.g., N and P) perturbations induced by changes in CO2 concentration and climate. Moreover, C cycle and other nutrient cycles and climate change, and the link between them are altered due to different natural and anthropogenic disturbance agents. The focus of this session will be the integrated understanding of climate, carbon and nutrient cycles and human activity (i.e., land cover and land use change) feedbacks in terrestrial ecosystems.
H65: Long-Term Memory in Hydroecology: Is There a Role for Equilibrium Models in Transient Systems? Global climate change dictates that an understanding of coupled hydrologic and ecological processes requires long-term memory effects involving transient system evolution and not just short-term processes. A number of factors affect the characteristic timescales of ecosystem processes, including groundwater dynamics, ecosystem aggradation/degradation, soil development, and climatic cycles. While much of the modeling community continues to embrace optimization or equilibrium approaches, we need to explore interactions with long-term transience in hydroecological processes. For this session we seek papers that address this issue through the use of mixed data and/or modeling approaches, a combination of water and (carbon or nutrient) fluxes and storages, and specifically attempt to understand characteristic timescales of processes. Example papers might consider ground water dynamics as a driver of net ecosystem exchange of carbon, large-scale changes in vegetation as a driver of water and carbon budgets, interactions between human-dominated and more natural systems, and interactions between terrestrial and aquatic systems.
The 7th meeting of the Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) of the Global Carbon Project (GCP), under the auspices of the international Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP), occurred in Hazyview and Kruger National Park, South Africa, on 20-22 August 2007. A total of twenty-two national carbon cycle experts from around the world discussed progress made on GCP activities over the past year, including defining the global carbon cycle, emission and sink trends, vulnerabilities of carbon sinks, and urban and regional carbon management. On the second day, they discussed and made a commitment to adopt global bioenergy as a new GCP element or program activity under the ESSP project. On the last day of the meeting, the national programs on carbon cycle science reported on regional activities. The U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program, represented by Roger Hanson, presented an update on U.S. science activities and collaboration activities with North American partners in the newly adopted Joint North American Carbon Program (Canada, Mexico and the United States). Furthering this collaboration effort beyond North America, the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group sought GCP SSC assistance in developing a framework or platform for a global synthesis of national carbon program syntheses. A formal arrangement to engage this activity between the international SSC and CCIWG was established through the GCP International Project Office and U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program Office. The terms of reference for this engagement were approved and the regional synthesis challenge that the CCIWG offered to the SSC for full consideration was taken up. The SSC co-Chairs, Michael Raupach (Australia) and Anand Patwardhan (India), assigned the initial interim “synthesis of syntheses” to Philipe Ciais (France) and Corinne LeQuere (UK). They, along with Ming Xu (China), Raupach, Patwardhan, Pep Canadell (Australia), and Hanson, framed a preliminary process to initiate a GCP first synthesis book in two years time. The lead authors of book will balance the content over continents and adjacent ocean basins. A workshop is planned for December 2008 to synchronize and harmonize chapters prepared by expert contributors from national carbon programs.
On Aug 21-22, 2007, the NACP Science Steering Group (SSG) met in Greenbelt, MD with the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) to discuss the need to organize a set of “Interim Synthesis” activities that will communicate major findings of the Program to scientists, government agencies, and the public over the next two years. In addition, the SSG plans to develop a timeline for future synthesis and integration of NACP results that will be widely discussed with the investigator community at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, and hopes to work with an set of self-identified Working Groups that emerged from the All Investigators’ Meeting in Colorado Springs in January 2007. The full report can be viewed here.
Scott Doney (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute), chair of the Ocean Carbon and Climate Change Scientific Steering Group and member of the Carbon Cycle Science Steering Group, and Heather Benway (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) recently published a news item in Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin (Volume 16(3): September 2007). Their contribution describes the newly formed Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) program and provides information about upcoming research opportunities through NSF and NOAA (FY 2008 and 2009). The complete article is available here.
The Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) has recently welcomed three new members: Joseph Conny (National Institute of Standards and Technology), Louis Pitelka (National Science Foundation), and Mete Uz (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Cary Presser (NIST) and Kathy Tedesco (NOAA) have recently stepped down from their positions on CCIWG.
In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS Early Edition, published October 25, 2007), Canadell et al. find that the recent swift increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to faster economic growth coupled with a halt in carbon intensity reductions, in addition to natural sinks removing a smaller proportion of emissions from the air. Efficiency of natural sinks to remove emissions from human activities has been declining for 50 years. More information about the study is available from the Global Carbon Project website. This paper, along with an earlier paper by Raupach et al. (PNAS, published June 12, 2007), completes the first round of global carbon budget analyses, and new analyses are already underway.
On November 13, the US Climate Change Science Program released Synthesis and Assessment Product 2.2, The First State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR): The North American Carbon Budget and Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle. The report analyzes the amounts of carbon emitted by industry sector, the amount absorbed naturally and how these amounts relate to the global carbon budget influenced by other regions of the globe, with particular attention given to characterizing the certainty and uncertainty with which these budget elements are known.
Major findings of the report include:
More information is also available in the press release announcing the report and in the Summary and Frequently Asked Questions brochure.
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On November 28-30, 2007, participants from around the world gathered for the 50th Anniversary of the Global CO2 Record Symposium and Celebration in Kona, HI. The conference included presentations by and discussions amongst representatives from government, academia, industry, and non-governmental organizations; many of the presentations are available from the conference website. Participants also visited the Mauna Loa Observatory, which has been recording atmospheric CO2 levels since 1958. |
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Services (CSREES) recently announced selections under Carbon Cycle Science (CARBON07). NASA and CSREES sought proposals to improve understanding of changes in the distribution and cycling of carbon among the active land, ocean, and atmospheric reservoirs. Of special interest were the factors that affect changes in the sources and sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) and carbon management to slow increases of these greenhouse gases. A total of 35 proposals were selected, with approximately $25.9 million in funding provided over three years. More information about the program is available from the description of proposal opportunity and from the announcement of selections.
This page last updated August 1, 2008.