 |
|
Home | About | Programs | Interagency Partners | News | Events | Funding | Education & Outreach | Links | Documents |
|
|
|
Home | About | Programs | Interagency Partners | News | Events | Funding | Education & Outreach | Links | Documents |
|
The U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program is clarifying the changes, magnitudes and distributions of carbon sources and sinks, the fluxes between the major terrestrial, oceanic and atmospheric carbon reservoirs, and the underlying mechanisms involved including humans, fossil fuel emissions, land use, and climate. Program scientists are now beginning to reveal and quantify some of the intricate complexities and interactions between the Earth’s carbon reservoirs and climate. The program engages numerous science disciplines and extends over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. Ten federal agencies coordinate and support the program activities, which include the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group, Carbon Cycle Scientific Steering Group, North American Carbon Program, Ocean Carbon and Climate Change Program, and the State of the Carbon Cycle Report.
For more information, take a look at our recent poster.
In 1989, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) began as a presidential initiative to monitor, understand, and predict climate change, drawing on a broad range of interdisciplinary science elements, including biogeochemical dynamics, ecological systems and dynamics, climate and hydrologic systems, human interactions, earth system history, solid earth processes, and solar influences. In 1990, the USGCRP was codified by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990.
In 1999, the National Research Council (NRC) report Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade specifically emphasized the need for a comprehensive carbon cycle research strategy. In response, the Carbon and Climate Working Group of USGCRP, wrote A U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan (1999) to establish the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program.
In 2002, President George W. Bush established the Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI); currently, the work of USGCRP and CCRI are integrated under the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). The objective of this management structure is to improve global observing systems, reduce significant uncertainties in climate science, develop science-based information resources to support policy making and resource management, and disseminate the new knowledge broadly among the international scientific and user communities. In 2003, the CCSP integrated the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program into its Strategic Plan.
The Carbon Cycle Science Program contributes to all of the CCSP goals outlined in the Strategic Plan and focuses particularly on Goal 2: Improved quantification of the forces bringing about changes in the Earth's climate and related systems. It directly addresses the global carbon cycle research element and questions and is synergistic with the ecosystems, global water cycle, climate variability and change, atmospheric composition, land use and land cover change, human contributions and responses, and observations research elements.
In 2007, the Global Carbon Project Scientific Steering Committee accepted Terms of Reference that recognized the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program an Affiliated Office of the Global Carbon Project.
Carbon cycle science requires an unprecedented coordination among scientists and supporting government agencies. The nature of the carbon cycle demands this: carbon is exchanged among three major, active reservoirs (the ocean, the land, and the atmosphere) through a variety of physical, chemical, and biological mechanisms, and includes both organic and inorganic components. Because a large number of government agencies are involved in supporting research on the carbon cycle (ranging from data gathering to analysis and modeling), extraordinary value can be gained by coordinating research and encouraging disciplinary and organizational cross-fertilization through effective program integration. Thus the Carbon Cycle Science Program seeks to better understand past changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, deliver credible predictions of future atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and strengthen the scientific foundation for management decisions in numerous areas of great public interest.
The intent of the Carbon Cycle Science Program is to develop a strategic and optimal mix of essential components, including sustained operations, modeling, and innovative process studies. This design calls for coordinated, rigorous, interdisciplinary scientific research that is strategically prioritized to address societal needs.
There are two components to the Carbon Cycle Science Program research strategy:
See A U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan (1999) for further discussion of these elements.
The Carbon Cycle Science Program has two overarching questions at its core. Each of these questions flows into specific long-term goals and implementation objectives. See A U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan (1999) for further discussion of these questions and objectives.
Long term goals include:
Implementation objectives include:
Long term goals include:
Implementation objectives include:
In order to both improve scientific knowledge and understanding of the carbon cycle and support application of this scientific knowledge to societal needs, a number of strategic research questions are used to guide the efforts of the Carbon Cycle Science Program:
7.1 What are the magnitudes and distributions of North American carbon sources and sinks on seasonal to centennial time scales, and what are the processes controlling their dynamics?
7.2 What are the magnitudes and distributions of ocean carbon sources and sinks on seasonal to centennial time scales, and what are the processes controlling their dynamics?
7.3 What are the effects on carbon sources and sinks of past, present, and future land-use change and resource management practices at local, regional, and global scales?
7.4 How do global terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric carbon sources and sinks change on seasonal to centennial time scales, and how can this knowledge be integrated to quantify and explain annual global carbon budgets?
7.5 What will be the future atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and other carbon-containing greenhouse gases, and how will terrestrial and marine carbon sources and sinks change in the future?
7.6 How will the Earth system, and its different components, respond to various options for managing carbon in the environment, and what scientific information is needed for evaluating these options?
These questions are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7 of the CCSP Strategic Plan.
These research highlights are discussed in greater detail in the Global Carbon Cycle chapter of Our Changing Planet (FY 2008).
A preview of activities planned in each of the Climate Change Science Program's research elements is available in Preview of Our Changing Planet (FY 2008).
Increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 and methane (CH4)
are major drivers of climate change. The global carbon cycle element of the CCSP
seeks to better quantify and understand the dynamics of the global carbon cycle
that determine CO2 and CH4 fluxes and carbon storage in terrestrial and oceanic
ecosystems. Carbon cycle processes depend on climate, and thus linking carbon
cycle and climate change analyses is critical. Carbon cycle research involves
multiple disciplines and extends over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. Major multi-agency
activities include the North American Carbon Program (NACP), an effort to describe and reduce
uncertainties about the North American carbon budget and underlying processes, and the Ocean Carbon and Climate Change (OCCC) Program, an effort for oceanic research aimed at determining how climate change will affect the future behavior of the oceanic carbon sink. In FY 2008, NACP will
address key gaps and uncertainties in the synthesis developed previously (Synthesis and Assessment
Product 2.2), and aspects of OCCC and NACP will be coordinated to better quantify and understand
the roles of adjacent ocean basins in the North American carbon budget. NASA will launch the
Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) to provide for the first time consistent atmospheric carbon
observations globally from space, and carbon data assimilation systems will begin to derive estimates of
carbon sources and sinks from these measurements.
CCSP’s carbon cycle research element will integrate the research efforts of the North American Carbon Program and relevant aspects of the Ocean Carbon and Climate Change Program to better quantify and understand the carbon budget of North America and adjacent ocean basins, including terrestrial, freshwater, oceanic, and atmospheric sources and sinks, the underlying processes, and the dynamics that determine influences on atmospheric CO2 and CH4. This integration will clarify and reduce uncertainties about the North American carbon budget and provide better information for the decisionmaking processes of carbon management. Improved observations, methods, and understanding of carbon cycling will be integrated into global models and analysis systems to provide more reliable capabilities for studying and predicting future changes in atmospheric CO2 and CH4 and carbon storage by terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems.
These research plans are discussed in greater detail in the Global Carbon Cycle chapter of Our Changing Planet (FY 2008).
This page last updated November 20, 2007 .