Clark as Co-I on newly funded NASA CMS Grant

J. Blake Clark (616/UMBC) is a Co-I on a NASA Carbon Monitoring Systems proposal that was recently selected for funding. The grant, titled "Integrating Lateral Carbon Fluxes into Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) Ocean Carbon Estimates," will be led by PI Cecile Rousseaux (GSFC/616). In addition to Dr. Clark, other Co-Investigators include Louise Chini (UMD), George Hurtt (UMD), and Stephanie Schollaert Uz (NASA GSFC). Work is expected to begin in Summer 2023.

Dr. Clark provided the following summary:

"Climate, weather, and land characteristics directly affect the concentration and composition of organic and inorganic matter, including carbon, delivered to the rivers and ultimately to the oceans. Although the uptake of carbon dioxide by phytoplankton at the surface of the ocean and its recycling into dissolved organic carbon and nutrients are routinely represented in models, the lateral transfer of carbon from land to oceans is severely underrepresented or completely missing from current models. This is sorely needed for carbon accounting and particularly critical in the global assessment and estimates of carbon stocks. In this project we improve existing CMS products by adding this transfer and transformation of organic and inorganic matter as well as quantifying the effects of land use and changes on the resulting global ocean carbon flux. An existing terrestrial biosphere model (Ecosystem Demography model, ED) combined with the Land-Use Harmonization (LUH) dataset provide fluxes of carbon and nutrients from land to rivers under varying land use and land cover change scenarios. The River-Estuary model transports and transforms aqueous forms of carbon and nutrients to represent the lateral fluxes of carbon and nutrients from rivers to the NASA Ocean Biogeochemical Model (NOBM) currently used to produce the CMS global carbon fluxes. This project will add critical components and processes to the current CMS-flux products by adding the effects of land use and change on the transfer of carbon to rivers, the transport and transformation of organic and inorganic matter in rivers and the effects these processes have on the global ocean carbon budget. The modeling tools and output developed by this project will directly feed into the global carbon budget and be adopted by stakeholders in the ocean carbon sector, among others, who will provide feedback that will be used to co-develop monitoring tools and mitigation solutions."