IMPRS course 'Biogeochemical Cycles in the Earth System - an Overview'
- Start: Apr 25, 2022
- End: Apr 29, 2022
1. General information
Date: April 25-29, 2022
Location: MPI-BGC
Teacher: Martin Heimann
Category: Courses related to BGC cycles - Overview course
1.2 CP for the whole course
Goal
of the module is an overview over the global Earth System, its major
components (Atmosphere, ocean, land surfaces and cryosphere), their
interactions through exchanges of energy, momentum and materials, and
the major physical, chemical and biological processes controlling these
exchanges. A special emphasis is given to the role of the global cycles
of biogeochemical elements and their modifications in the context of
global change.
2. Prerequisites
Please indicate in the registration form if you can bring a laptop to the course (for the practical part). You will need the Wolfram Mathematica CDF Player and a web browser. Alternatively, you need on your laptop a working version of Python 3 accessible through Jupyter notebooks. An installable version of the Mathematica CDF Player for Windows and for MacOS is available on the OwnCloud course website (see below). If you do not have a laptop available, we can lend you one if we know early enough.
3. Course materials
will be posted always after the lectures in nextcloud.
4. Preliminary outline
Legend
L = Lecture, D = Demonstration, G = Group work
09:00-12:00 L
- Introduction - Overview of Earth System
- Components and processes in the Earth System (atmosphere, ocean, land surfaces, water cycle)
- Fundamental scientific questions
- Energy balance
- Exercises with simple energy balance model
- Feedback calculus
- Daisy-world
- Bifurcations and chaos
- Introduction to BGC modeling
- Carbon cycle
- Ocean carbon cycle
- Land carbon cycle
- Modeling biogeochemical cycles - simple box models
- Exercises with simple carbon cycle model
09:00-12:00 L
- Oxygen cycle
- Isotopes of carbon and oxygen (13C, radiocarbon, 18O, 17O)
- Comprehensive carbon cycle modelling
- Feedbacks between carbon cycle and climate
- Exercises with simple coupled global carbon cycle - climate model
09:00-11:00 L
- Cycle of methane
- Elementary atmospheric chemistry
- Earth System History
- How do we know what climate was like in the past?
- Co-evolution of climate and atmosphere — Faint young sun paradox
- Snowball earth and the C-rock cycle
- Last 50 million years (descent into ice age)
- Glacial-interglacial cycles
- Holocene climate variations
09:00-12:00 L
- Cycles of essential nutrients: N, S, P
- Comprehensive Earth System models
- Global change
- Climate Engineering
- presentation and discussion of the Earth System science questions1
1 During the course a few Earth System science questions will be posed, which the participants are asked to work on in groups during the the course. Each group will present the context of the question, the approach in trying to answer it and the results during the session on a separate day (tba). More details will be announced in the course.
5. Literature
- Wallace and Hobbs, Atmospheric Science, Elsevier Academic Press, International Geophysics Series, v92, 2002, ISBN: 0-12-732950-1, 483pp.
- Schlesinger: Biogeochemistry - An analysis of global change, Elsevier Academic Press, 1997, ISBN: 978-0-12-625155-5, 588pp.
- Jacobson,
Charlson, Rhode and Orians: Earth System Science, Elsevier Academic
Press, International Geophysics Series vol. 72, 2000, ISBN:
978-0-12-379370-6, 527pp.
6. Registration
>> Register here by April 11, 2022