The impact of the 2015/2016 El Niño on the terrestrial tropical carbon cycle: patterns, mechanisms and implications

Professor Mat Collins , University of Exeter, UK

Matthew Collins is Joint Met Office Chair in Climate Change in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of Exeter. His research interests are in climate modelling, quantifying uncertainty and probabilistic climate prediction, seasonal to decadal climate predictability and in understanding climate variability, especially ENSO. He currently leads the NERC-funded “Robust Spatial Projections of Real-World Climate Change” project (Large Grant Scheme). He has been a contributing author on two of the most recent IPCC reports (TAR and AR4) and was a Coordinating Lead Author on the IPCC AR5. He is the co-chair of the newly formed CLIVAR Climate Dynamics panel. He is a member of the scientific steering committee of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and a member of the steering committee for the UK Climate Projections 2018 project. From March 2016 he has been an editor of the Journal of Climate.

Dr Juan Carlos Jimenez, University of Valencia, Spain 

Juan C Jimenez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Physics & Thermodynamics (Faculty of Physics) at University of Valencia. He conducts his research in the Global Change Unit of the Image Processing Laboratory at University of Valencia. His research focuses on thermal infrared remote sensing using Earth Observation sensors on board satellites, with particular emphasis on the development of algorithms for Land Surface Temperature retrieval and calibration/validation of LST products. Other research interests include retrieval of evapotranspiration, soil moisture and analysis of surface urban heat island. His recent research efforts are primarily focused on using remote sensing and reanalysis data to analyse the warming trends and drought patterns over tropical forests (with emphasis on Amazonia) driven by climatic factors such as ENSO or sea surface temperature anomalies over other oceanic regions.

Professor Richard Betts, Met Office Hadley Centre and University of Exeter, UK

Professor Richard Betts is Chair in Climate Impacts at the University of Exeter and Head of Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office Hadley Centre. His research focusses on interactions between climate, land ecosystems and the carbon and hydrological cycles. He has been involved in a number of pioneering advances in Earth System modelling and quantifying the influences of human-induced land cover changes on climate and the impacts of climate change on global ecosystems. He was a Lead Author on the IPCC Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports, first in Working Group 1 (Physical Science Basis) and then Working Group 2 (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability). He was also a lead author on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, contributed to the First and Second UK Climate Change Risk Assessments, and was an expert reviewer of the Stern Review. Richard is currently coordinator of the EU-funded project HELIX (High-End cLimate Impacts and eXtremes).

Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany

Professor Emanuel Gloor, University of Leeds, UK

Emanuel Gloor is a Physicist by training (ETH Zürich, Switzerland). His research focuses on the global carbon cycle and related cycles (eg methane), and the response of these cycles to a changing climate. Some of his research focusses on the tropics and in particular Amazonia. He has led a NERC consortium (AMAZONICA) which focused on understanding the resilience of Amazonian forests. One of the components of AMAZONICA was initiation of a basin-wide lower-troposphere greenhouse gas monitoring program over the Amazon together with Luciana Gatti and John Miller, which continues until today. These data are the basis of the presentation at this meeting. He is also involved in studies aiming at understanding limits of functioning of tropical forests based on on-ground measurements and targeted experiments.

Dr Junjie Liu, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Nasa, USA

Professor Paul Palmer, University of Edinburgh, UK

Paul Palmer is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh. His research is focused on understanding the physical and chemical processes that drive variations in the atmospheric composition of Earth, embracing data, models, and theory. He has pioneered new methods to interpret satellite observations of reactive trace gases and particles and greenhouse gases. In recent work relevant to this discussion meeting, his group has revealed the importance of eastern African wetlands as a globally relevant source of methane. He is also the science director of the NERC National Centre for Earth Observation and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is a science team member of NASA and Japanese satellite instruments that measure atmospheric GHGs and is the UK co-lead of the French-UK MicroCarb satellite mission. He sits on the European Commission CO₂ Task Force that is delivering information to support Europe’s response to the Paris Agreement. 

Professor Pierre Friedlingstein , University of Exeter, UK

Professor Pierre Friedlingstein is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit recipient, he holds a Chair in Mathematical Modelling of the Climate System at the University of Exeter. He is also, currently on leave, Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France. He has 25 years research experience in the field of global carbon cycle modelling, global biogeochemical cycles and global climate change and published over 120 peer-reviewed articles including 35 in Nature journals, Science or PNAS. He has been a Thompson Reuters Highly cited researcher every year since 2014. He developed dynamic global vegetation models (DGVM) in order to investigate the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the global carbon cycle at multiple time scales. He was one of the first who used a terrestrial carbon cycle model to estimate the changes in land carbon content over glacial-interglacial cycles. He pioneered the science of climate and carbon cycle feedbacks, proposing an original mathematical framework for feedback analysis. His C4MIP paper, published in Journal of Climate in 2006, is in the most cited papers on carbon cycle or climate change since its publication (>1300 citations). He coordinates the coupled climate carbon cycle intercomparison project (C4MIP). He is member of the Working Group on Climate Modelling (WGCM) of WCRP as is past member of Global Carbon Project (GCP). He is actively involved in climate assessment through his participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1994. He was lead author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report for both Working group I and for the Synthesis Report.

Dr Rosie Fisher, Terrestrial Sciences Section Climate and Global Dynamics National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA

Dr Rosie Fisher works on carbon cycle process representation in Earth System Models, primarily via coordinating developments of the Community Land Model, most recently those concerned with nutrient cycling, and the representation of plant demographic processes, community assembly and vegetation dynamics. She has worked in the tropics on rainfall exclusion experiments, and is the co-lead of modeling activities in the US Department of Energy Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment in the tropics.  Her other interests include fire-vegetation dynamics, parametric sensitivity and plant drought physiology.

Professor Yadvinder Malhi FRS, University of Oxford, UK

Yadvinder Malhi is an ecosystem ecologist who has advanced our understanding of the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and how they are responding to the pressures of global change, including climate change, degradation and loss of large animals. This work integrates insights from ecosystem ecology into Earth System science, and has been characterised by a multidisciplinary approach that involves establishing broad networks of field research in tropical forests in some of the most remote and challenging regions of the world, and also application of micrometeorological approaches, global climate datasets, terrestrial ecosystem models and satellite remote sensing. This work has contributed to our understanding of the carbon sink in the terrestrial biosphere, and to how it may be vulnerable to climate warming.

His interests extend to a broad understanding of contemporary change in the biosphere and how to navigate it, through a combination of natural sciences, social sciences and policy approaches.

Dr Jeffrey Chambers, University of California, USA

Jeff Chambers is an Associate Professor in the Geography Department, University of California, Berkeley, and a Faculty Scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research is focused on terrestrial ecosystem ecology, tropical forests and climate change, disturbance and recovery processes, vegetation dynamics, and land-atmosphere interactions. Methods employed to address these questions include ecological and physiological field measurements, remote sensing image analysis, and simulation modeling. Much of his work has taken place over more than 20 years in Amazon forests, in collaboration with scientists and students at Brazil's National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA).