Risø DTU is hosting the first annual meeting of the EU supported research project CARBO-Extreme from 13 to 15 September 2010. About 60 researchers from the EU, the USA and Switzerland will meet at Risø DTU to discuss their latest findings on how strongly extreme weather events affect the European CO2 balance. New evidence suggests that extreme weather influences the biospheric CO2 balance dramatically, which in turn may accelerate climate change. This effect is not included in today's climate models. CARBO-Extreme is set up to acquire the necessary knowledge to improve climate models in this regard.  | In order to obtain the necessary scientific knowledge about how extreme weather affects the European CO2 balance, the European Commission is supporting the CARBO-Extreme project with approx. 25 million Danish kroner (approx. €4 million) over four years. The project will develop new knowledge about the impact of enhanced climate variability and extreme events on ecosystem processes and include it in the estimation of the future European carbon balance.
CARBO-extreme thus contributes directly to the European strategies for the protection of climate and soil. Read more about CARBO-Extreme here
Read more about the conference here
The conference at Risø DTU is 13-15 September and includes a visit to CLIMAITE experimental site at Jægerspris. Read more about CLIMAITE
Risø DTU is a partner in this project which is coordinated by the German Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena.
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Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases not only lead to global warming, but also to increased climate variability and extreme weather. August 2010 has been a prime example of these phenomena and their consequences for nature and humanity. In this month, the heaviest ever floods in Pakistan, one of the strongest heat waves ever in Russia with huge forest fires as a result; not to mention one of the most powerful cloudburst over Denmark with drowning cars on Lyngbyvej in Copenhagen and flooded homes in Kokkedal, have all occurred. Changing rainfall patterns, more heat waves, longer droughts, stronger variation in growing season length and more frequent occurrence of heavy cloudbursts are expected as a consequence of future climate change.
These extreme climatic events have great importance for nature's living conditions and thus the global biospheric CO2 balance. This became clear to scientists after the heat wave in central and southern Europe in 2003. During this time, within only a few weeks, the ecosystems lost as much CO2 as they had absorbed from the atmosphere through the previous five years under normal weather conditions. Disturbance of the terrestrial carbon balance can offset the so far negative biospheric feedbacks on climate change. This could lead to the current existing negative feedback turning into a positive effect, i.e. reinforcing climate change.
Scientists had to acknowledge that the processes in ecosystems in extreme weather conditions are not yet satisfactorily understood to calculate the risk at continental scale. The current climate models do not take this potentially high risk into account, possibly leading to a too positive picture of future climate change. The CARBO-Extreme project uses, among other, findings from the Danish climate experiment CLIMAITE, near Jægerspris and from a beech forest at the Sorø Academy area where two research groups from Risø DTU have studied CO2 exchange between the atmosphere and vegetation for more than 13 years. These results are used to investigate whether climate models can simulate realistic CO2 balance figures.
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