Arctic Seasonality Conference Day 2
October 19, 2010 – 10:30 amDuring our second day at the conference, we broke out into groups and talked about linking projects together and defining next steps for research into changing arctic seasonality. One of the ideas that I was excited about was creating a formal research collaboration structure that allowed modelers and observational scientists to work together to create better models.
Apparently, this type of structure is already in place for many climate modeling teams. As I understand it, the climate modelers describe what empirical data they need and the observational scientists then attempt to collect that data or to convince the climate modelers to modify their models to include more realistically measurable data. This has apparently worked well for climate modelers and our working group agreed that this could be a successful approach for looking at arctic biogeochemical cycling as well.
A couple other scientific loose ends that I found interesting: (1) It is apparently unknown when the last time in geologic history that the Arctic Ocean was ice free. There are theories but it is up for debate. Would have thought we knew that, but I guess not. (2) Changes in snowfall and snowpack were a theme common to many projects. One of the breakout groups suggested that a comprehensive review of snow manipulation experiments would be useful if it does not already exist.
Finally, it was great to talk to a collaborator on our arctic plant-soil interactions project, Seeta Sistla, who is doing some cool modeling of soil decomposition processes that includes microbial enzyme activity. I’m looking forward to working on matching up that model with measurements from our experiment in Alaska.
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