The project “ICON for coupled carbon cycle climate modelling (ICON-4C4M)” funded through the Extramural Funding programme of the German Weather Service (DWD) aims to integrate a novel representation of terrestrial (project part “land“ at MPI-BGC) and a state-of-the-art marine (project part “ocean” at University Hamburg) biogeochemistry into the ICON Earth system model. The project will contribute to an enhanced representation of the interactive carbon cycle in ICON for climate science applications in the context of CMIP7 and C4MIP. Specifically, this project aims to contribute to a better understanding of the transient climate response to anthropogenic emissions and the implications for carbon-cycle feedbacks for atmospheric CO2 and climate change under future emission pathways.
The offered PostDoc position is associated with the project part ‘land’, which will be integrated into the TBM group. The project will focus on further integrating the QUINCY model (Thum et al. 2019, GMD) within ICON-Land and testing/applying this new land component in coupled climate simulations using ICON. The key innovation of QUINCY is the seamless coupling of biogeochemical (e.g. nutrient limitation of carbon uptake) and biogeophysical processes (e. g. land-atmosphere coupling and surface energy partitioning), permitting to simulate both, the fast responses of vegetation to diurnal and seasonal extremes and the long-term responses of ecosystem structure and carbon storage to climate change. These changes are expected to lead to more realistic estimates of the development of the land carbon sink under changing climate and atmospheric CO2.
The PostDoc will closely collaborate with the ocean biogeochemistry group of Prof. T. Ilyana, and scientists at the DWD and the MPI for Meteorology to develop a fully interactive carbon cycle for ICON and study carbon-cycle climate feedbacks in the 21st century.