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TRR 32:  Muster und Strukturen in Boden-Pflanzen-Atmosphären-Systemen: Erfassung, Modellierung und Datenassimilation

Fachliche Zuordnung Geowissenschaften
Agrar-, Forstwissenschaften und Tiermedizin
Chemie
Mathematik
Förderung Förderung von 2007 bis 2018
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 15232683
 
Erstellungsjahr 2020

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

Research in TR32 focussed on mesoscale continental terrestrial systems, which encompass as their compartments the soil including the groundwater interacting with the soil, the land surface with vegetation, lakes and rivers, and the atmosphere. While research addressed terrestrial systems in general, the Rur catchment in western Germany with small parts in Belgium and in the Netherlands - a typical European midlatitude catchment covering an area of approximately 2400 km2 close to the cooperating institutions - was selected as its main experimental and modeling area. The central goal was the observation, understanding and modeling of patterns in regional terrestrial systems, and the exploitation of the new knowledge for the provision of high-quality predictions of state variables of the system including the fluxes of water, CO2, and heat energy within and between its compartments on different spatial and temporal scales. New technologies were developed for measuring soil structure including pores and their water content including roots in three dimensions with geoelectrical methods, for observing in-situ the development of plant roots via cameras running underground in tubes, for quantifying transpiration of cereal plants with miniscule heat flow devices, for monitoring the photosynthetic activity of plants via fluorescence effects, for quantifying large scale near-surface soil moisture and the atmospheric boundary-layer moisture and temperature by active and passive microwave observations, and for estimating precipitation and identifying cloud processes with polarimetric and multifrequency radiometers and radars. TR32 put a strong focus on geophysical methods, which allow to unveil the soil structure by its influence on induced electrical currents and electromagnetic wave fields. With these methods the often observed spatially heterogeneous growth of crops could be related to subsurface soil structures originating from old river channels covered and blurred over centuries by land management. Novel miniaturized systems were developed for observations on centimetre scales and first steps were made to apply these methods on larger scales using aircrafts as device carriers. But also laboratory observations on the soil led to new discoveries, like the dependence of the soil respiration by living organisms on e.g. soil temperature, which will have profound influence of its simulation in land models. Three sensor networks – SoilNet - of the order of 100 sensors observing soil moisture and temperature at different depths over kilometer-wide areas, about ten cosmic ray probes which allow to estimate soil moisture variations in a radius of about 100 m from a station via the scattering of extra-terrestrial neutrons by the Hydrogen in the water molecules, the rhizotron facility in Selhausen for observing plant growth under natural and managed conditions and the Cloud and Precipitation Exploration Laboratory (CPEX- Lab) including the Jülich Observatory for Cloud Evolution (JOYCE) set up at Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH and the twin polarimentric X-band weather radar setup in Bonn and the Sophienhöhe near Jülich are the most prominent installations, which quasi-continuously operate and constitute important infrastructures for follow-up research on terrestrial systems. The Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform TerrSysMP is the most prominent model development by TR32 as a universal tool to simulate and predict the state evolution of regional terrestrial systems on grid resolutions for 100 meters to several kilometers. TerrSysMP couples the distributed, hydrological model ParFlow simulating in three dimensions the flow of water and heat in the saturated (groundwater) and unsaturated soil and on the surface (rivers) with the land surface model CLM of NCAR simulating besides the exchange between the land and the atmosphere also all plant processes, and with the atmospheric model COSMO – the operational weather forecasting model of several European national weather services including the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). The model components themselves have seen many extensions reaching from river flow parametrizations in ParFlow, the inclusion of vertical redistributions of soil water by roots, and improved soil respiration formulation and new plant parametrizations in CLM to the addition of variable CO2 in COSMO all of which led to new findings on the processes making up the terrestrial system. TerrSysMP is adapted to several HPC environments in order to allow also for regional weather and climate simulations up to continental scales. First steps were taken to develop TerrSysMP into an integrated monitoring system, which allows to assimilate arbitrary observations into the model in order to follow the current state of the terrestrial system and provide predictions. TerrSysMP has already become a central tool in several follow-up projects reaching from simulations and prediction on farms within the CoE PhenoRob to the continental scale in several ERC grants and is continuously updated with new components like the inclusion of the new German community atmospheric model ICON as an optional compartment model as an alternative to COSMO. The concept of patterns guided research in TR32 on all scales and all compartments of the terrestrial system. This led to new insights into the impact soil heterogeneity of the managed crops, which was first observed and then explained by dedicated model experiments. The impact of soil and vegetation heterogeneity on the atmosphere was analyzed with high-resolution coupled soil-atmosphere simulations on the meter scale, which revealed noticeable imprints of the surface patterns in the state of motion of the atmospheric boundary layer including the evolution of clouds as also seen in observations. This new knowledge was implemented in the TerrSysMP model framework, which served as an accumulator of TR32 research and remains besides the developed infrastructures as one of its prominent achievements.

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