Carbon tracker and water availability controls of land use and climate changes

Abstract

This proposal concerns the Consequences of global climate change in the functioning of ecosystems, with emphasis on the water and carbon cycles, especially the sectors of water resources and agriculture, and the balance of radiation in the atmosphere, aerosols, trace gases and changes in land use. The proposal seeks to estimate and interpret greenhouse gases (GHG) and surface hydrological exchanges at large- and regional scale in Brazil, both due to climate variation and land use changes (LUC), using consistent field measurements and modeling of the land-atmosphere system. We aim to answer: if the Amazon basin operates as a sink or source of GHG, which intrinsically adds much uncertainty in the assessment of long term predictions of regional climate; on what extension the LUC reduces the water availability, and how it might combine future global climate changes; where and how the medium term policies of adaptation to climate change could be tackled in critical areas. By means of a consortium of Brazillian instituions (USP, Embrapa, IPEN, DAEE, IBt) , UK (Univ of Leeds) and american (NOAA), we plan to developing spatio-temporal distributions of carbon fluxes, estimating mean net carbon flux for Amazon basin (sink or source), using a computational & field data assimilation system -- the carbon tracker, that includes LUC and the aerosol effects: emphasizing the strong link between GHG with the hydrological cycle, and calculating changes in water status and ecosystem productivity in the Amazon basin, for a range of climate scenarios: estimating surface water and carbon fluxes across several ecosystems in Amazonia, Cerrado and Atlantic Forest, using observation in flux tower sites; assessing the hydrological effects of land use changes, for a range of climate change scenarios, in meso-scale watersheds in the biomes of Cerrado and Atlantic Forest. (AU)