Objective
The EU Environment and Climate Research Programme has as one of it's main objectives within the field of Global Change to help meet the objectives of the Internafional Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the Human Dimensions of Glohal (Climate Change Programme (HDP). The present proposal is part of the multi-disciplinary, European NOPEX project, one out of a few prioritised full-scale land-surface experiments within the IGBP-BAHC framework. Present knowledge about likely climatic change is that the largest influences can be expected at high latitudes and during winter time. This would imply that studies of land-surface-atmosphere exchange should be concentrated to high latitudes and winter time. This has not been the case so far. It has been generally assumed that because of the small net radiative fluxes to the terrestrial surface in winter there has not been very much to. Individual studies have, however, shown that various exchange processes can be important during the winter as well as have large impact on the onset of mass and energy budgets in the spring.
The NOPEX organisation includes programmes for Concentrated Field Efforts (CFEs), where a large number of research groups participates in field activities in the NOPEX region during a limited period of time. The Continuous Climate Monitoring (CCM) programme consists of two main field micro-meteorological and actinometric stations together with four research catchments. Two CFEs have been carried out in the spring and summers of 1994 and 1995. Since the main objective of NOPEX is to study the annual and daily cycles of the regional land-surface budgets of energy, water, and CO2, plans have been to perform a third CFE during winter conditions. A full-scale such experiment will be very resourcedemanding and must be very carefully planned in order to minimise risks with a failure. It is the objective of this proposal to perform this planning.
Measurable objectives is to provide this planning through the following activities:
(1) Use of mesoscale atmospheric models, tested over the NOPEX area with data from the CFE1 and CFE2, to test various hypotheses for processes which are likely to be important in winter conditions and to perfom sensitivity analyses of these models;
(2) Use of hydrological models including dynamics of snow and frozen soils. Such models will be tested against measurements from various types of land surfaces. Remote-sensing data coupled with GIS techniques will be used to make modelling results available as lower boundary conditions in the meso-scale atmospheric modelling;
(3) Evaluate remote-sensing techniques to test and develop algorithms describing facets of the NOPEX winter-time landscape. The remote-sensing data will be carefully integrated with the requirements from the modelling groups in the project;
(4) Perform a limited pilot experiment to test measurement equipment in order to earn practical experience in the special climatic problems to be encountered during winter conditions (freezing temperatures, long nights, low solar angles, snow fall blowing past precipitation gauges etc...).
Such tests will specifically be made within the NOPEX CCM (Continuous Climate Monitoring) programme (running since May 1994) to improve the chances for this to deliver unbroken data series also during harsh as well as rapidly changing winter conditions and to guarantee availability of data from climatic events that occur seldom but which may have a large importance for the budgets of water, energy and carbon.
frost, hydrology, interception, meteorology, NOPEX, remote sensing, snow, soil, winter
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesmeteorology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographycartographygeographic information systems
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental scienceshydrology
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringremote sensing
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
752 36 UPPSALA
Sweden