Twenty-two LTER Climate Committee members met at the LTER All Scientists Meeting in Estes Park, Colorado September 19, 1993 to review past activities and discuss potential research projects to pursue. Over the last three years, members of the Climate Committee have participated in a number of activities:
- A proposal, An Updated Climatic Description and Synthesis Document for Long-Term Ecological Research Sites, was written by David Greenland, Tim Kittel, and Bruce Hayden and submitted to NSF Long-Term Studies in March 1992, but was not funded. However, in light of NSF’s current emphasis on intersite research activities, it will be resubmitted.
- The Climate Ecosystem Dynamics bulletin board was established.
- Bruce Hayden (Virginia Coast Reserve) and Rudolf Nottrott (Network Office) arranged for Global Climate Model (GCM)-generated data to be put on-line.
- David Greenland participated in the Ninth Annual Pacific Climate (PACLIM) Workshop at Asilomar, CA, April 21-24, 1992, and contributed an article to the proceedings publication (Climate Studies in the Long-Term Ecological Research Program. Technical Report 34, California Department of Water Resources).
- Chair David Greenland represented the Climate Committee at the Albuquerque, New Mexico LTER NAS
- Remote Sensing Workshop in November 1992, and contributed a spin-off publication (Use of satellite-based sensing in land surface climatology, Progress in Physical Geography, 17(4)461-474). A separate workshop report is available from the Network Office.
- David Greenland and other Committee members have represented the Climate Committee by providing information and assistance for non-LTER and LTER Network projects, such as the 1991 LTER site directory, and the intersite on-line climate database.
Climate as a Core Area
A proposal was presented by John Magnuson (North Temperate Lakes) to designate climate as a core area for LTER studies. Climate is viewed as a basic component of LTER sites and is specifically considered in many of the principal hypotheses investigated at individual sites. Climate is not only a disturbance factor common to all sites, but is also a major driving control of the whole ecosystem of the sites. The group identified several advantages of designating climate as an explicit LTER core area. It would:
- Help to emphasize the important two-way interaction between the atmosphere and biosphere, thus aiding the generation of setter research questions—particularly those climatologists ask of ecologists and vice-versa.
- Provide for more effective convergence of atmosphere-biosphere links. There is a growing awareness in atmospheric science of the need to pay heed to the biosphere, and in ecology of the need to treat atmospheric processes. The existing, and very important, convergence of these trends in the two disciplines would be speeded if climate were considered more explicitly.
- Provide better spatial and temporal scaling of climate variation for process-based distributed modeling efforts.
- Provide ecologists with a more direct link to climate models and the climate modeling community.
- Stimulate development and utilization of climatic expertise at LTER site home institutions.
- Promote site use of the Network climate database.
- Emphasize the fact that climate and climatic data provides one of the few opportunities for synthesis available across the Network.
Climate Work at LTER Sites
LTER site representatives provided brief summaries of historical climate records available, as well as some of the more important past and ongoing climate-related projects. Among these were measurements of micro- or mesoscale variables and fluxes, hydrological measurements and modeling, and some atmospheric deposition measurements. Many sites have established, or are establishing, a mesoscale network of observing stations to supplement the data from the their “primary” meteorological sites. Climate data have been used at all sites to drive ecological models; however, certain sites have pursued climate-related studies that would be impossible, for various reasons, to duplicate across all sites. Outstanding examples of these are the carbon dioxide flux eddy- correlation tower studies at Harvard Forest, coherence among lake climate and chemistry at North Temperate Lakes, and lightning strike studies at Sevilleta.
A discussion about how best to perform a times series analysis/synthesis of climate data of the LTER sites revealed concerns that, in some cases, standardization of the analyses may not pick up the time window needed to detect anomalies. A robust analysis across sites would have to incorporate identification of that window for each site. Doug Schaefer (Luquillo) will lead the production of a paper reviewing completed and in- progress climatic studies and observations at LTER sites.
Future Activities
The following research activities and projects will be pursued over the next three-year period:
- Resubmit the Climatic Description and Synthesis Document proposal to NSF
- Write and submit a proposal to revise the site climate analysis document
- Continue to participate in activities resulting from the All Scientists Meeting El Niño Workshop
—Phyllis Adams and David Greenland