Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), emitted from living organisms (mainly plants), are reactive and have significant effects on the air quality, climate and ecosystem processes. BVOCs influence the climate system through lengthening the lifetime of methane (a potent greenhouse gas), changing atmospheric ozone concentration (air pollutant and also greenhouse gas), and increasing secondary organic aerosol (SOA, influencing the solar radiation received by the Earth). The Arctic is warming at twice the global rate, and the warming-included drastic changes in plants and permafrost can result in substantial impacts on the BVOC emissions. Recent field and lab observations from the Arctic indicate that BVOC emissions from arctic plants are particularly sensitive to climate warming. In addition, warming-induced permafrost thaw can also release large amounts of BVOCs. All these observed features related to arctic BVOC emissions from plants and soils have not been considered in the state-of-the-art model estimates. This project added these plant-related emission features into a process-based ecosystem model, LPJ-GUESS, and addressed the importance of these features in terms of estimating pan-Arctic plant BVOC emissions. To estimate BVOC emissions from soils (further focus on permafrost soil), this project summarized the current process understanding about soil BVOCs and proposed a framework for adding soil BVOC processes in large-scale models.
The recent report Global Warming of 1.5 ºC, issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stated the goal of limiting global warming of 1.5 ºC above pre-industrial levels and stressed the global response to the threat of climate change. The society emphasis on climate change focuses on how the climate will change in the next few decades and also on how we can adapt to these changes. This project seeks to solve one of the key puzzles in understanding the role of the Arctic in regional and global climate systems, which can contribute to improve the predictions of the extent of climate warming and associated changes. The climate models suggest a continuous warming in the Arctic. The amplified warming in the Arctic will result in large losses of ice and snow, which not only pose threats to local people’s livelihoods, customs and infrastructure, but also contribute to the sea-level rise around the world. Fundamental studies devoted to process understanding of arctic ecosystems and their feedbacks to the climate system in the context of climate warming are of utmost societal important at the local and global levels. This project tackles poorly-understood issues about BVOC emissions from the arctic plants and soils; therefore, it can provide missing but essential data to quantify BVOC feedbacks to atmospheric chemistry and also reduce models’ uncertainties in predicting regional climate change.
The overall objective of this project is to first explicitly incorporate arctic BVOC dynamics based on field observations into a large-scale ecosystem model, LPJ-GUESS, and thereafter apply the developed model to estimate and predict of BVOC emissions over the pan-Arctic region.
