Overview
ESD’s Climate and Carbon Sciences Program (CCS) is an integrated program that seeks to understand the physical, chemical, and biological processes affecting the Earth’s atmosphere, land, and oceans. CCS conducts research into how Earth’s processes may be affected, either directly or indirectly, by changes in radiative forcing of climate resulting from energy production and use. In addition, program research on biogeochemical cycles and climate also addresses other pressing issues such as stewardship of water resources and the environmental effects of biofuels. To that end, we have active projects on climate and hydrology, climate change, terrestrial and marine biogeochemistry, and carbon sequestration by terrestrial ecosystems. Note that after seven years of successful expansion, in 2007 the Climate Change and Carbon Management Program was divided into two programs, Climate and Carbon Sciences (summarized below) and one for Geological Carbon Sequestration (summarized elsewhere in this volume).

CCS is also poised to develop new areas of climate science, including research in biofuels and alternative energy, subsurface hydrology, computational mathematics, and other fields. CCS has several significant research initiatives in these areas, with demonstrated potential to make vital contributions to BER’s climate change portfolio. These include:

• The conceptual design of a Center for Integrated Earth System Modeling
• New methods for measuring and understanding the stabilization of soil organic matter and ecosystem feedbacks to climate change
• Regional hydrometeorology and the hydrological impacts of climate change

In the fall of 2007, the Program hosted a multinational lab workshop on abrupt climate change. The product of this workshop was the beginning of a large, long-term, interdisciplinary DOE-funded project that will greatly improve our ability to predict the probability of abrupt climate change—using a set of five different mechanisms, from ice-shelf disintegration to high latitude ecosystem response.

Scientific Focus Areas
CCS investigations span and integrate all four DOE Basic Energy Research Office (BER) Scientific Focus Areas (SFAs) in climate change:

1. Climate Change Forcing
2. Climate Change Modeling
3. Climate Change Response
4. Climate Change Mitigation

Each of these SFA’s is discussed in greater detail below.

Climate Change Forcing
The goals of Berkeley Lab’s terrestrial carbon research include supporting the development, testing, and application of Integrated Terrestrial Carbon Models (ITCMs) that will be used to simulate carbon fluxes in North America in the near term, and coupled with global climate models in the long term. This work is a multi-institution collaboration under the coordination of the lead lab in this SFA, Oak Ridge. Berkeley Lab is pursuing five areas of research relevant to improving carbon cycle understanding: (1) better characterization of ecosystem CO2 fluxes and resulting atmospheric concentrations; (2) spatially and temporally resolved measurements of fossil CO2 emissions; (3) better understanding of soil carbon cycling; (4) simulation of feedbacks between carbon dynamics and climate change in global carbon-climate models; and (5) diagnosis of carbon modules in global climate models using AmeriFlux, North American Carbon Program (NACP), and other carbon system observations.

CCS is also carrying out innovative observations of the ocean carbon cycle that would contribute to removing a major gap in coupled carbon-climate modeling. Oceans contain more carbon than any other dynamic reservoir on earth. They pose a great observational challenge because the pulses of biological productivity are episodic and cover vast areas. CCS scientists have developed the Carbon Explorer, an autonomous float that uses satellite telemetry to report its observations from distant oceans. Twelve of these low-cost robots have achieved the equivalent of 8 years of continuous observations of particulate organic carbon in remote and biologically dynamic ocean regions, observations that would not have been possible with conventional research ships. Seagoing work to prove and enhance new sensors for the Carbon Explorer is ongoing. CCS’s new sensor for particulate inorganic carbon was operationally deployed to full ocean depth during a pole-to-pole survey transects of the Atlantic Ocean in July 2003 and January 2005. The data it reported allow the first comprehensive examination of the spatial variability of particulate organic and inorganic carbon. CCS’s optical carbon sedimentation recorder was most recently deployed in Oyshio waters near Japan.

Climate Change Modeling
Simulations from global models provide critical information required to attribute past climate change and ameliorate future climate change. Despite the sophistication of current coupled climate models, they will benefit from inclusion of biogeochemical feedbacks, improved spatial resolution, and an understanding of abrupt climate changes. To understand the role of these processes in regional and global climate change, the climate community should develop Earth system models (ESMs) designed to simulate the coupled physical, chemical, and biogeochemical evolution of the environment. It is increasingly critical to project local extremes in precipitation and other weather conditions forced by climate change. However, these projections are subject to large uncertainties, driven by specific uncertainties in model physics and restricted model resolution. Uncertainty reduction hinges, in part, on site-to-regional-scale process-based studies leading to new parameterizations in ESMs, analysis of model-simulated atmospheric physics and dynamics with observational evaluations, and high-resolution studies of the space-time evolution of extremes and anomalous weather and climate states. New research is needed to understand whether projections of extremes can converge with better process fidelity and higher spatial resolution.

Climate Change Response
To guide DOE energy policy decisions, we need integrated economic analyses of climate change, based on both projections of climate impacts and mitigation/adaptation analyses for biofuel and fossil fuel emissions (for GHGs and aerosols). Integrated models that address both the socio-economic and environmental impacts of energy and land-use systems, at a spatially disaggregated scale with temporal feedbacks, are lacking in current analyses.

Toward meeting this need, the physical impacts of climate variability and change (floods, droughts, heat waves, electricity demand) are a major modeling and analysis component at Berkeley Lab. Work within CCS on these impacts (by Miller and Jin) has appeared in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports, as well as the U.S. Global Change Research Program Assessments. Their research is focused on understanding regional impacts and reducing uncertainty across scales, and includes important studies of climate change impacts on alpine hydrology and snowpack. These activities, along with the DOE Water-Energy Nexus, have helped to develop the important physical-economic linkage for integrated assessment. Miller and Jin have quantified the range of possible extreme heat days and coupled energy demand, projected demand, and supply availability. New work includes development of heat day simulations and new building codes for cooling/heating.

Climate Change Mitigation
Limitations in current soil carbon models cripple scientists’ ability to predict climate effects on CO2 fluxes or to evaluate carbon sequestration and land management strategies. Four major gaps in the understanding of soil carbon dynamics have been identified (e.g., by BERAC, DOE, and USDA) that are important for both coupled climate-carbon modeling and carbon management, and that can be addressed in the next 5 years. Specifically, the priority areas for soil carbon research are (1) the effect of plant allocation and species on carbon residence time; (2) physical protection of soil organic matter, by minerals and aggregation; (3) temperature and moisture interactions; and (4) testing and improvement of model performance. We have in hand sufficient understanding and data to begin developing much improved model parameterizations for several of these areas.

Partnerships and Funding
Underlying all this work are CCS’s active partnerships with universities, industry, and other research laboratories. Key among these is our strong partnership with UC Berkeley, which includes collaboration with faculty, sharing research facilities, teaching, advising and mentoring UC students, and interaction with the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, Berkeley Water Center, and Berkeley Institute of the Environment. We have exciting new research projects on biofuels starting under the aegis of the Energy Biosciences Institute.

The Climate and Carbon Science Program is funded by a variety of federal and state agencies, and international collaborations. The most important sponsor is the U.S. Department of Energy, through the Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, and Office of Fossil Energy. Valuable support also comes from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; National Science Foundation; National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as the California Energy Commission, CAL-FED, and the Energy Biosciences Institute.

For more information, please contact:

Margaret Torn
Climate Change Program Head
Phone: 510-495-2223
Fax: 510-486-5686
Email: mstorn@lbl.gov

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