Expertise and experience
The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) is the UK's Centre of Excellence
for research in the terrestrial and freshwater environmental sciences.
CEH is owned by the UK Natural Environment Research Council. NERC is
the UK's principal agency conducting research into the structures,
processes and functioning of the Earth and the animals and plants
that live on it. NERC's mission is to advance understanding of the
natural environment and the processes of environmental change. In
this spirit NERC supports basic and strategic science within universities
and its own institutes, undertakes surveys and long-term observations,
funds postgraduate training and provides advice to government and public
agencies in the UK and in Europe. CEH is, with a staff of approximately
600 researchers, the UK government's primary research organization with
responsibility for terrestrial and freshwater ecology and hydrological
research. The science in CEH is organized in 5 science programmes, one
of which is Climate Change. This programme combines long standing expertise
both in the area of i) climate modelling and biogeochemical cycles; and
ii) Earth observation and remote sensing. CEH is one of the founding
partners of the NERC Earth Observation Centre of Excellence CLASSIC
(Climate and LAnd-Surface Systems Interaction Centre). The Centre
investigates land surface-atmosphere interactions using remote sensing
and state-of-the-art climate and land surface models in a coordinated
research programme.
The Section for Earth Observation (SEO) at CEH Monks Wood has 12 permanent
members of research staff plus students and develops methods and algorithms
to exploit image data acquired by satellite and aircraft to enable
quantitative Earth system science. Earth Observation data are deployed
to quantify patterns and processes of the terrestrial biosphere,
including impacts of environmental change and human activities on
ecosystems. Within the European Initiative on Global Monitoring for
Environment and Security (GMES), SEO works towards the demonstration
of pre-operational environmental monitoring techniques. The work of
SEO includes the calibration and validation of current sensors and the
design and evaluation of new measurement technologies. Outputs from the
section like the UK Land Cover Map are widely used in research, policy
and environmental management (over 500 registered data license holders).
The Global Processes Section at CEH Wallingford has considerable experience
with running and improving climate models. Through a close collaboration
with the Hadley Centre, through the Joint Centre for HydroMeteorological
Research at Wallingford (JCMHR) CEH researchers work have made extensive
use of the Met Office Unified Model to investigate climate impacts of land
cover change (for example in the Sahel) and land/atmosphere interactions
(for example in Amazonia). CEH have considerable experience in taking
measurements of the fluxes of heat, water and carbon in field campaigns
throughout the world including the Sahel, Amazonia, boreal and tundra
regions. These data have been used to test and improve the land surface
model of the Met Office Unified Model for these biomes.
CEH researchers have made substantial contributions to European research,
notably leading the FP4 programmes: Climate and Land Degradation (CLD)
and Land Arctic Physical Processes (LAPP), leading the FP5 GMES project
BIOPRESS (Pressures of pan-European land use change on biodiversity),
and contributing to FP5 project including Predictability and Variability
of Monsoons and the Agricultural and Hydrological Impacts of Climate
Change (PROMISE), Multi-sensor concepts for full greenhouse gas
accounting in Northern Eurasia (SIBERIA-2) and the FP6 projects AMMA
(African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis) and GEOLAND in the GMES
initiative.
Role in this project
WP3: scaling from the point to region to continent using a three
stage process: 1) calibrate and validate the model against data from
available flux sites - note this may come in an earlier WP. 2) Upscale
to the region of West Africa using JULES assimilating satellite data
(MODIS, MSG etc) and reanalysis products to provide both the surface
state and high resolution meteorological forcing. Calculations will be
made on a 5km grid between 5 deg N and 20 Deg N and 16 deg W and 15 deg
E long for the duration of the AMMA extended observation period 2005-2007
(see below). 3) Estimate long-term (1979-2008) pan-African fluxes at 1°
resolution using JULES driven by ERA40 forcing data and NDVI products for
surface state (Los et al 2005). These fluxes will be validated using
the outputs from 2 above.
Principal Investigator and collaborators
Richard Harding, Dr., has 25 years experience in evaporation
measurement and modelling techniques. He has made soil moisture,
meteorological and evaporation measurements in India, Africa, N America
and over Europe. In recent years he has concentrated on studies measuring
and modelling fluxes of water and CO2 from arctic land surfaces. Dr
Harding led the EU funded programme 'Climate and Land Degradation',
which investigated, through modelling studies, the impact of land cover
change on climate in the Sahel and Iberian peninsula. Dr Harding is
currently a PI on a number of EU and NERC funded projects making measurements
and modelling studies in Europe, the arctic and Europe and is deputy
Director of CLASSIC. Current research interests include, Arctic hydrology,
including mass and energy balances of snow and ice surface. large-scale
hydrological modelling, Global Climate modelling and land surface/atmosphere
interactions.
Christopher Taylor, Dr., a PI on AMMA projects funded by
NERC and EU (FP6). Leading AMMA international working group on
Land-Atmosphere Feedbacks. 13 Years experience in modelling and observation
of land-atmosphere feedbacks, much of which has focused on West Africa.
Phil Harris, Dr., 4 years experience developing and running
land surface and climate models. Experience with carbon and water exchange
in tropical biomes, notably Amazonia.
France Gerard¸ Dr., has 11 years of experience in the field
of remote sensing. Her main focus throughout her career has been the
retrieval of forest parameters from optical sensors, measuring land cover
vegetation cover, and dynamics in various environments: boreal, and
sub-tropical forests, temperate and semi-arid grasslands. Current
research interests include forest disturbances, the global carbon cycle
and habitat quality and biodiversity. She is currently coordinating the
EC funded project BIOPRESS "Linking Pan-European land cover change to
pressures on biodiversity" and is Co-Investigator of a number NERC funded
projects.
Example publications
Balzter, H., Gerard, F.F., George, C.T., Rowland,
C.S., Jupp, T.E., McCallum, I., Shvidenko, A., Nilsson, S., Sukhinin, A.,
Onuchin, A. and Schmullius, C. (2005): Impact of the Arctic Oscillation
pattern on interannual forest fire variability in Central Siberia,
Geophysical Research Letters 14, doi:10.1029/2005GL022526.
Balzter, H., Skinner, L., Luckman, A., and Brooke,
R. (2003): Estimation of tree growth in a conifer plantation over nineteen
years from multi-satellite L-band SAR. Remote Sensing of Environment 84,
184-191.
Balzter, H., Talmon, E., Wagner, W., Gaveau, D.,
Plummer, S., Yu, J.J., Quegan, S., Davidson, M., Le Toan, T., Gluck, M.,
Shvidenko, A., Nilsson, S., Tansey, K., Luckman, A. and Schmullius, C.
(2002): Accuracy assessment of a large-scale forest map of Central Siberia
from Synthetic Aperture Radar. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing 28, 719-737.
Clark, D.B., Xue, Y., Harding, R J., Valdes, P., 2001.
Modeling the impact of land surface degradation on the climate of Tropical
North Africa. J. of Climate, 14, 1809-1822.
Gerard, F., Plummer, S. North, P. & van Rooyen, A.
2001, Natural resource in Southern African drylands: determining spatial
availability and variability using ATSR2 time series. First International
Workshop on the Analysis of Multitemporal Remote Sensing Images, Trento,
13-14 Sept. 2001.
Gerard, F., Plummer, S., Wadsworth., R., Ferreruela,
A., Iliffe, L., Balzter, H. and Wyatt, B. (2003): Forest fire scar detection
in the boreal forest with multi-temporal SPOT-VEGETATION. IEEE Transactions
on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 41, 2575-2585.
Gerard, F.F. 2002. Single and dual angle viewing,
multi-temporal viewing: assessing the implications for forest structure
parameter extraction through modelling. International Journal of Remote
Sensing.
Harding, R.J., Jackson, N.A., Blyth E.M., Culf,
A., 2002. Evaporation and energy balance of a sub-arctic hillslope in
northern Finland. Hydrological Processes, 16, 1419-1436.
Harding, R.J., Kuhry, P., Christensen, T.R., Sykes,
M.T., Dankers, R., van der Liden, S., 2002. Climate feedbacks at the
tundra/Taiga interface. Ambio, 12, 47-55.
Onuchin, A., Balzter, H., Borisova, H. and Blyth,
E., in press, Climatic and Geographic Patterns of river-runoff formation
in Northern Eurasia, Advances in Water Resources.
Xue, Y., Hutjes, R.W.A., Harding, R.J., Claussen,
M., Prince, S., Lambin, E.F., Alan, S.J. and Dirmeyer, P., 2004. Vegetation,
Water, Humans and the Climate. Global change - the IGBP series. Part A The
Sahelian Climate. 27 pages. In press.
