My research is focused around the development, coordination and use of community and surface models, including the Community Land Model CLM and the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator FATES.

CLM

The Community Land Model is the most actively developed open-source predictive model of the surface of the Earth’s surface. CLM is widely used (e.g as an integral part the IPCC process to predict:

  1. the future of the Earth’s climate system ) to predict:
  2. the impacts of climate change on the land surface &
  3. how human-induced modifications of the land surface can affect the climate.

FATES logo
FATES is an advanced demographic, open-source vegetation model developed across a wider community that includes, the UA Dept of Energy, NCAR, CICERO and the NorESM team, and many other university collaborators. FATES is one of the first of a new wave of ‘demographic vegetation models’ which explicitly represent the rescovery of ecosystems after disturbance, making it particularly useful for understanding how climate hazards and human activities affect the Earth’s carbon cycle.
NorESM logo
FATES in NorESM FATES a vegetation model that is part of CLM is the new vegetation scheme of the Norwegian Earth System Model, NorESM. Since 2024, our team of land model scientists and software engineers from CICERO, MetNo and the University of Oslo have been building the capacity, tuning and infrastructure to allow NorESM3 to include the first implementation of CLM-FATES in a CMIP class Earth System Model.