Novel constraints on the coupling between the water and carbon cycles

Aims and Scope of the Meeting

Large-scale water and carbon cycles are intrinsically linked – water being a first-order determinant of vegetation productivity and, in turn, vegetation exerting a strong control on regional water fluxes and atmospheric chemistry. Understanding how this coupling will be altered by a rapidly changing climate is currently one of the most pressing issues in Earth System Science.

Novel biogeochemical tracers, remotely sensed observations, theoretical understanding and model developments in this field have been evolving rapidly over the last decade. This Mary Anning conference will take stock of these developments and map out potential new directions and nurture collaborations. We will have a particular focus on the understanding of how novel observations providing insight and constraints on biosphere-atmosphere interactions can be used to derive new information about the coupling of the water and carbon cycles and their representation in Land Surface Models. Emerging methods and topics of interest include linking surface measurements and mechanistic processes to large-scale products such as:

• solar induced fluorescence;

• surface carbonyl sulphide budgets;

• vegetation optical depth and;

• stable isotope tracers.

These data have varying levels of maturity, but using them together is rarely achieved. We aim to encourage discussion around the use of these diverse datastreams to test novel hypotheses via empirical, process-based and hybrid models, including state-of-the-art theoretical advances such as optimality. The conference will include a forward look into what new data sources and scaling techniques are foreseen to come online in the next few years.