Inter-annual Land Surface Variation

Principal Investigator: Dr. Prince

The aim of this project the use of satellite data to study the nature, patterns and implications of regional-scale land-surface dynamics, emphasizing the spatial patterns and responses of vegetation to transient perturbations in the 1-20 yr range.  The project brings together a group of several Earth-system science disciplines (use of remote sensing technology, vegetation studies, and climate and biosphere modeling) in an integrated, observational and process-modeling program.  It is exploring vegetation changes in space and time using the 20 yr archive of NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer data and other satellite (e.g., geostationary meteorological satellite, SeaWiFS, TOVS, MODIS), meteorological and mapped data.  Functional properties of the land surface will be inferred, and we will describe transient vegetation patterns as revealed in the full range of surface variables.  Diagnostic vegetation models that relate the observed dynamics to the forcing variables will be developed.  An important part of the project is to detect and describe the spatio-temporal patterns of the land-surface conditions at time-scales shorter that those of long-term biogeographical processes that determine the type of vegetation that occupies a site.  The implications of the observed land-surface dynamics for carbon sequestration and fluxes of water, energy and momentum will be explored using distributed vegetation and soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer (SVAT) models.  Special attention is being paid to regions where the climate is most sensitive to the land-surface forcing, including semi-arid, boreal and temperate biomes.