Climate & Carbon Sciences Program
The global carbon cycle strongly regulates earth's climate, while anthropogenic disturbance of the carbon cycle is the main cause of current and predicted climate change. At the same time, humans depend on the terrestrial carbon cycle for food, fiber, energy, and pharmaceuticals. The Climate and Carbon Sciences Program of the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory encompasses both atmospheric and ecosystem processes, seeking to improve understanding of climate forcing, ecosystem-climate feedbacks, and ecosystem goods and services like biofuel production, carbon sequestration, and climate change adaptation. The Program is focused around a set of interrelated goals and integrates a wide range of expertise and tools to conduct fundamental science and to improve predictive climate models.
We run the LBNL/ARM Carbon Project at the ARM Southern Great Plains Climate Research Facility, one of the best-instrumented sites for regional carbon studies in the world, and have research experiments on three continents that are focused on soil carbon storage and turnover. We have substantial strengths in climate modeling, including new development and application of fully coupled land surface-climate models. These models enable increasingly robust predictions of climate extremes, abrupt climate change, and integrated climate-land use-energy systems possible.
The Climate and Carbon Sciences Program is a central component of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Carbon Cycle 2.0 initiative. CC2 harnesses the Lab's diverse research activities toward delivering creative solutions for a carbon-neutral energy future. The Climate & Carbon Sciences Program is currently headed by Bill Collins and Margaret Torn.