Climate change and efforts to address it have put the electric utility system under increasing pressure to adapt and evolve. Key to the success of these efforts will be the support of public utility commissions, the state agencies that oversee retail electric utilities. In an effort to determine how these...
Two distinct nocturnal subcanopy flow regimes are observed beneath a tall (16 m) open pine forest canopy. The first is characterized by weaker mixing, stronger stability, westerly downslope flow decoupled from the flow above the canopy and much smaller than expected ecosystem respiration from the eddy flux plus storage measurements...
We sought to improve net ecosystem exchange (NEE) estimates for a tall, dense, mature Douglas-Fir forest in the Oregon Coast range characterized by weak flows, systematic wind directional shear, and limited turbulent mixing throughout the diurnal period. We used eddy covariance (EC) observations at two levels and concurrent biological measurements...
Background: Management strategies have been proposed to minimise the effects of climate
change on forest resilience.
Aims: We investigated the Pacific Northwest US region forest carbon balance under current
practices, and changes that may result from management practices proposed for the region’s
34 million ha of forests to mitigate climate...
Terrestrial ecosystem-atmosphere exchange of carbon, water vapor, and energy has been measured for over a decade at many sites globally. To minimize measurement and analysis errors, quality assurance data have been collected over short periods along-side tower instruments at AmeriFlux research sites. Theoretical and empirical error and uncertainty values have...
Forest fires contribute a significant amount of CO₂ to the atmosphere each year, and CO₂ emissions from fires are likely to increase under projected conditions of global climate change. In addition to volatilizing aboveground biomass and litter layers, forest fires have a profound effect on belowground carbon (C) pools and...
Five years of eddy-covariance and other measurements at a mature ponderosa pine forest and a nearby young plantation are used to contrast the carbon fluxes for long-term averages, seasonal patterns, diel patterns and interannual variability, and to examine the differing responses to water-stress. The mature forest with larger leaf area...
This study quantifies the short-term effects of low-, moderate-, and high-severity fire on carbon pools and fluxes in the Eastern Cascades of Oregon. We surveyed 64 forest stands across four fires that burned 41,000 ha (35%) of the Metolius Watershed in 2002 and 2003, stratifying the landscape by burn severity...
We present an atmospheric inverse modeling framework to constrain terrestrial biosphere CO₂ exchange processes at subregional scales. The model is operated at very high spatial and temporal resolution, using the state of Oregon in the northwestern United States as the model domain. The modeling framework includes mesoscale atmospheric simulations coupled...
We present an inverse modeling framework designed to constrain CO2 budgets at regional scales. The approach captures atmospheric transport processes in high spatiotemporal resolution by coupling a mesoscale model with Lagrangian Stochastic backward trajectories. Terrestrial biosphere CO₂ emissions are generated through a simple diagnostic flux model that splits the net...