FIFE and BOREAS

Abstract:

The climate and weather general circulation models (GCMs) of the 1980's were primitive and unrealistic, and this at a time when more was being demanded of them for weather forcasting and climate prediction. A couple of seminal workshops kicked off the effort to (i) improve the representation of land surface-atmosphere interactions in GCMs and, (ii) develop new methods for using satellite data to initilaize and validate the improved parameterizations. The First ISLSCP Field experiment, (ISLCSP=International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project), was the pioneer effort to address these problems. The field phase involved 5 satellites, 8 aircraft and around 150 scientists, aircrew and students in five intensive field campaigns (IFCs) in the period 1987-1989. Significant gains were made in improving and testing land surface models and in using satellite data to scale the models up to continental scales as a result. FIFE was followed by BOREAS - the Boreal Ecosystem Atmosphere Study - which had a field phase 1993-1996 in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada. BOREAS was joint US-Canadian enterprise and expanded on the two original ISLSCP goals to encompass carbon exchange and terrestrial ecosystem processes in the context of climate change. Two large study areas, some 500 kilometers apart and at opposite ends of the boreal forest, were investigated using satellites, aircraft, flux towers and a wide range of surface observations. 300 people were involved and 10 field campaigns were executed. The data from these two experiments were used and are still being used to refine land surface parameterizations, including treatments of the carbon cycle, for GCMs and other large scale modeling work.

These field experiments, conducted within a single decade, mark the boundary between the eras of primitive "bucket" models of the land surface in GCMs and the biophysically realistic Earth System models of the 21st century.