Predicting future climate with a networking initiative to support interdisciplinary research

Science Daily: Specialists from various Earth system science disciplines recently gathered to address a major question: what will our environment look like in the future? Of course, possible answers to this question raise even more questions. For instance, if changing climatic conditions were to alter local vegetation, how would this new landscape react to future climatic trends? Answering these questions with certainty would allow us to manage better our natural resources by defining appropriate planning and mitigation actions.

To be able to identify and analyse long-term climatic trends and changes, it is important to have access to near-continuous data of our planet over long periods of time, which is made possible by Earth-observation (EO) satellites.

These data are being increasingly incorporated in various disciplines as tools to evaluate the current situation and to observe changes that have occurred over the last 30 years, since the mainstreaming of EO data. However, in order to provide better model simulations of our climate and the consequences of human behaviour for climate, the various communities in this field -- modellers, ecologists, Earth-observation specialists and researchers -- need to collaborate and merge their research and findings.

The Terrestrial Biosphere in the Earth System (TERRABITES) research network was created to provide a context that facilitates this interdisciplinary cooperation. TERRABITES is funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) programme, financed by the EC and supported by ESA.

Dr Christian Reick, chair of TERRABITES, described the activity as "a cross-disciplinary assessment of our current understanding of the terrestrial biosphere from an Earth system perspective to improve the reliability of future Earth system projections in coupled climate-biosphere simulations."

…Today, more remote sensing data is being acquired, developed and delivered to the global modelling community than at any other time in our history. As a consequence, more and more data are being incorporated into climate models. ESA's Climate Change Initiative, for example, is generating, preserving and providing access to long-term EO data sets of 'Essential Climate Variables' and making them freely available to climate research and modelling communities worldwide….

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission will make global observations of soil moisture over Earth’s landmasses and salinity over the oceans. Variations in soil moisture and ocean salinity are a consequence of the continuous exchange of water between the oceans, the atmosphere and the land – Earth’s water cycle. Image from the European Space Agency