About the project
The northern climate has been shifting to a new regime over the past decades. Not only are summers longer and warmer, but winter weather has become increasingly variable. This has led to an increase in mid-winter warm spells, rain-on-snow events, and the loss of snow cover. All of these extreme winter events can damage vegetation, causing economic losses for forest industries while also affecting how much CO2 plants can take up from the atmosphere.
Worryingly, we don’t know what the potential is for extreme winter events to affect the CO2 balance of the Arctic-Boreal region in the future, even though the vegetation and soils of this vast biome hold immense amounts of carbon. Part of the reason is the fact that Earth system models remain incapable of simulating the damaging impact of winter warming on vegetation, and subsequent feedbacks to the atmosphere.
Objectives and experiments in Cold Climate Container
In the SnowLess project we will use a unique set of tools and methods to – for the first time – accurately simulate the response of vegetation to changing winter weather in a land surface model. The project will use a unique setup to study the vulnerability and resilience of vegetation to extreme winter weather by using a frozen laboratory – The Cold Climate Container at the University of Oslo, Dept. of Geosciences. The Cold Climate Container is a controlled climate chamber that can replicate various conditions in a range of extreme winter events, including frost droughts and false springs, to measure the cold tolerance of plants and how much water is transported through plant tissues.
In addition, we will use the laboratory directly to adjust the calibration of the land model CLM-FATES while testing against field observations from Norway, Svalbard, and the USA. The goal is to create a crucial link between modeling and detailed ecological research. Finally, we will project the impact of extreme winter weather on vegetation using the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM). Our aim is to demonstrate how these connections could amplify globally significant feedbacks from the Arctic-boreal region in the future.
Background
The SnowLess project is affiliated with the interdisciplinary research centre CBA – Centre for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene at the University of Oslo. The centre has a special focus on interactions and feedbacks between climate, carbon cycling, and ecosystems at northern latitudes. Learn more about CBA centre and the research network of people on this website.
In the SnowLess project, we will conduct controlled laboratory experiments in The Cold Climate Container. This is a unique laboratory and workshop developed by the research group LATICE – Land-Atmosphere Interactions in Cold Environments, a research network at UiO that has been studying the significance of interactions between the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and hydrosphere in a changing climate since 2015.
