In mid August i was lucky enough to be invited to teach at the Advanced Climate Dynamics Course ACDC at Abisko in Northern Sweden.

25 years ago (!), my office-friends in Edinburgh (Lorna Street and Mark van Wijk), spent much of their time observing, theorising, talking and writing about Abisko, and so this remote and scenic field station is somewhat legendary to me, further because it is surrounded by (without any doubt) the most well studied and experimented-upon bit of arctic tundra in Europe. I’ve been calibrating models with data measured there sporadically ever since (not least Alistair Rogers’ measurements of his all-time-highest photosynthetic capacity of the shrubby vegetation down by the lake, so he tells me…). So naturally, I was very enthusiastic to visit - even more so as it meant I got to circumnavigate Scandinavia by train (Oslo-Stockholm-Abisko-Narvik-Trondheim-Oslo) in the process :)

ACDC has been running since 2009, and gained an enviable reputation along the way. Land modeling is typically out of their remit (I don’t consider myself a ‘climate dynamicist’!), but this year’s theme was ’landscapes and climate’, and so happily I was asked to join to complement Marysa Laguë and Lucas Vargas Zeppetello’s land-atmosphere interaction perspectives. Much of the time I spent trying to grapple with the thorny question of how complex models can learn from more idealized representations of the system (perhaps there is a need to create even-more reduced form configurations of our models?).

One huge highlight was having a little time to briefly think hard about matters not directly relevant to operational land surface modeling! As such, it was an immense delight to discover Øyvind Paasche’s fascinating and unique journey from philosophy to geoscience (and maybe back again!), as well as experience his field tutorial in how to think like a geomorphologist (which I apparently ruined by chatting too much, so I don’t think there’s much hope for me in that arena…). I also had my mind thoroughly blown away by Axel Timmerman’s insanely brilliant and interesting research into prehistoric mammalian food webs, human dispersel and the evolution of culture. Given that the vegetation predictions of CLM underpin the relationship between climate dynamics and ecosystem productivity in his paleoclimate simulation, I left awash with distacting ideas for how to link FATES’ treatment of vegetation dynamics, ’tipping point’ thresholds and fire into that system.

Many thanks in particular to David Battisti who is the maestro of ACDC and has invested a huge part of himself into its legacy and pedagogy. I now (at long last) think I might actually know what Rossby waves are, and moreover, learned a great deal about how to create an excellent and immersive environment for teaching and learning…

I’ve a bit more travel in September to the NextGenCarbon meeting in Ümea, and the Land Model Summit in Frascati, so I couldn’t stay for the whole two weeks of the summer school. But If you all invite me back I’ll make sure to stay the whole time!

CICERO has been funded by the Spark Foundation to run CLM-FATES as part of the Warming Induced Emissions Model Inter-Comparison Project. In past iterations of CMIP, there has been no platform to look specifically at the responses of the terrestrial biosphere to future climate forcing, aside from the limited set of coupled experiments inside the C4MIP protocol (which are coupled climate model experiments and so subject to large variations in baseline climate which can overwhelm differences in behaviour). Future offline experiments were part of ISIMIP, which has a timeline delayed by several years as waits for the output of coupled model future scanerios to drive impact models (none of which is focused on the responses of natural ecosystems or the carbon cycle to future climate forcing). This is major gap, but happily time and dedicated resources have been provided by the SPARK foundation to provide this critical missing information.

Simulations are running and submissions are planned before summer to allow analysis to inform IPCC-AR7 timetables.

For several years we in the NorESM, CLM & FATES network have been very busy coding, calibration, testing debugging, recalibrating, coupling, spinning up, and analysing output from the first global version of CLM-FATES. This has been a monumental and all-consuming effort on the part of a large team of dedicated scientists. To more broadly share our activities with the newly minted global version of the model. There are a few goals.

1. To provide a means of pooling infomation from across several institutions and networks on the many scientists working on CLM-FATES related activities in Norway (see network page)
2. To provide publically accessible updates on these activities (via news and blog posts)
3. In think that land surface models are a unique and undervalued as a tool to help humanity plan for the future, both near and distant. Here I plan to discuss the myriad of interesting ways we could, should, or do leverage them to provide insights into the functioning of our fabulously complex and interlinked world.