The Boreal Ecosystem-Atmosphere Study (BOREAS) project has addressed fundamental questions concerning moisture and carbon in the boreal forest biome, such as:

What are the primary mechanisms controlling variability in water and carbon fluxes within each of the major boreal ecosystem types?

What measured modeling parameters are most important in terms of scaling up the seasonal patterns of water and carbon cycling across diverse ecosystem types within the boreal forest region?

Main objectives:

Evaluate the performance of the NASA-CASA (Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach) simulation model against water and carbon fluxes measured independently at BOREAS field sites.

Refine the concepts and algorithms upon which this generalized scheme for soil trace gas emissions can be built.

Evaluate requirements to scale-up model results and extrapolate interannual trace gas flux estimates over the entire North America boreal forest region, relying on satellite data to characterize properties of the land surface.

Results:

To see the results from the NASA-CASA modeling studies for BOREAS click here.

References

Potter, C. S., J. C. Coughlan, and V. Brooks. 1999. Investigations of BOREAS spatial data in support of regional ecosystem modeling. J. Geophys. Res. 104: 27,771-27,788.

Potter, C. S., J. Bubier, P. Crill, and P. LaFleur. 2001. Ecosystem modeling of methane and carbon dioxide fluxes for boreal forest sites. Can. J. For. Res. 31: 208-223.

Amthor, J. S., J. M. Chen, J. S. Clein, S. E. Frolking, M. L. Goulden, R. F. Grant, J. S. Kimball, A. W. King, A. D. McGuire, N. T. Nikolov, C. S. Potter, S. Wang, and S. C. Wofsy. 2001. Boreal forest CO₂ exchange and evapotranspiration predicted by nine ecosystem process models: Inter-model comparisons and relations to field measurements. J. Geophys. Res.. 106(D24):33,623-33,648.