Nancy Kiang (PI)
Goddard Institute for Space Studies
nkiang@giss.nasa.gov

ENT:  A Global Dynamic Terrestrial Ecosystem Model for Climate Interactions at Seasonal to Century Time Scales Through Coupled Water, Carbon, and Nitrogen Dynamics

This is a proposal to support development and application of ENT, a dynamic global terrestrial ecosystem model (DGTEM) that can be coupled with atmospheric general circulation models (GCMs). ENT will be capable of predicting the fast time scale fluxes of water, carbon, nitrogen and energy between the land-surface and the atmosphere and the resulting diurnal surface fluxes, seasonal and inter-annual vegetation growth, and decadal to century scale alterations in vegetation structure and soil carbon and nitrogen.  Radiative transfer, biophysics, biogeochemistry, and ecological dynamics will be  integrated in a consistent, prognostic, process-based manner, in a way that is both  biologically realistic and computationally efficient, and suitable for two-way coupling  and parallel computing in GCMs. The model is designed to span the goals of Goddard, GISS, and the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and can be used in conjunction with both the GMAO modeling system to allow assimilation of satellite data and with the GISS GCM for long-term climate studies. ENT will be a standalone set of modules that can be used by the climate modeling community to couple with land surface models and atmospheric GCMs for studies on seasonal weather evolution, vegetation phenology, the carbon budget, climate variability, paleoclimate, global change scenarios, vegetation-climate feedbacks, and astronomical biosignatures. ENT is envisioned as a tool for understanding the conditions and signatures of habitability of the Earth, ancient, modern, and future, and as a foundation ultimately for searching for life on other planets.

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