Work Package 4

WP 4: Carbon and nitrogen emissions from permafrost

Arctic carbon and nitrogen greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost environments are controlled by ecosystem-atmosphere exchange processes, the availability of carbon pools, and permafrost physical dynamics. Improved quantification of emissions and their controlling factors can only be achieved by expanding the current in situ observations over longer time periods (to the time scale of changes in the permafrost), and by improving the quality of these observations. This includes quantification of both the vertical ecosystem-atmosphere fluxes and the lateral fluxes by water, year-round monitoring, and the  standardization of methods.

This Work Package will acquire carbon, nitrogen and greenhouse gas flux data at representative permafrost sites using state-of-the-art eddy covariance instrumentation and chamber techniques for CO2, NO2, and CH4. This will provide the basic data that is necessary to understand the processes and to validate and calibrate the models, in order that we can upscale the fluxes using remote sensing data and models. This will then allow us to assess the vulnerability of carbon and nitrogen stores in permafrost and to project emission perturbations for a changing climate.

WP Coordinator:

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Principal Investigator:

Han Dolman

Collaborators:

• Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research
• The University Centre in Svalbard
• Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V.
• Lund University
• University of Copenhagen
• University of Hamburg
• Finnish Meteorological Institute
• University of Eastern Finland
• Institute for Biological Problems of Cryolithozone
• Moscow State University

Tweet

Share