Category Archives: Global change programs

iLEAPS-Japan

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Photo of Tsukuba rice fields in summer is by iLEAPS-Japan.

iLEAPS Executive Officer Tanja Suni and iLEAPS-Eurasia Executive Officer Hanna Lappalainen travelled to the 3rd International Symposium of Arctic Research (ISAR-3) in mid-January with the aim to create new collaboration between iLEAPS, iLEAPS-Eurasia, and Japanese and Russian scientists. One of the main points of collaboration was the Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX), a new iLEAPS project coordinated by iLEAPS-Eurasia at the Division of Atmospheric Sciences in the University of Helsinki.  The Finnish delegation also included Joni Kujansuu, the Finland-Asia coordinator of the Division working part-time for iLEAPS.

The delegation met five members of the Science Committee of iLEAPS-Japan in a small satellite meeting on the second evening of the conference. All the Japanese researchers present at the meeting are leading scientists in fields very relevant to either the new iLEAPS theme Sustainable Managed Ecosystems or to the Pan-Eurasian Experiment or both; Drs Takeshi Ohta, Tetsuya Hiyama, and Ayumi Kotani have more than 15 years of experience with land-atmosphere-society interactions in Eastern Siberia (http://www.chikyu.ac.jp/rihn_e/project/C-07.html) whereas Dr Kentaro Hayashi leads a large manipulation experiment on Japanese rice paddies at the Tsukuba University, looking at the influence of CO2 enrichment on carbon, methane, and, uniquely in Japan, also on reactive nitrogen cycles throughout the year (Free Air CO2 Enrichment experiment FACE http://www.niaes.affrc.go.jp/outline/face/; with nitrogen, FACE-N). The website of iLEAPS-Japan is now available in English as well; this will enable European scientists to keep track of the many land-atmosphere research activities in Japan especially around ASIAFLUX, where the leader of iLEAPS-Japan, iLEAPS SSC member Dr Nobuko Saigusa and iLEAPS-Japan coordinator Sawako Tanaka work actively to widen the flux measurement network in Japan, Korea, and other parts of South-East Asia. iLEAPS-Japan and coordinator Joni Kujansuu will also conduct enquiries in the Philippines in order to organise regional land-atmosphere-society activities there; one of the first steps will be an iLEAPS-ASIAFLUX early-career scientist workshop planned to take place in the Philippines in 2014.

iLEAPS IPO and iLEAPS-Eurasia would like to extend a very warm thank you for the entire iLEAPS-Japan group for a very pleasant and fruitful meeting!

iLEAPS-Japan

Dr Nobuko Saigusa (Chair, iLEAPS SSC member)
Ms Sawako Tanaka (coordinator)
Centre for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES)
Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

http://ileaps-japan.org/

 

Land-atmosphere research for global sustainability

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iLEAPS (Integrated Land Ecosystem – Atmosphere Processes Study) is an international research programme focussing on the land-atmosphere interface. The iLEAPS International Project Office (IPO) is hosted by our Division since the start, and for the past 8 years, iLEAPS has tried to advance multidisciplinary research on land-atmosphere interactions in an international setting. Now, the IPO consists of Tanja Suni, Alla Borisova, and 10% of Magdalena Brus.

The first phase of iLEAPS (2004 – 2014) has been a time of awareness-raising and establishing a united community of land-atmosphere scientists. Science conferences held in Helsinki (2003), Boulder (2006), Melbourne (2009), and Garmisch-Partenkirchen (2011) brought to light the importance of land-atmosphere processes and feedbacks in the Earth System, and a number of publications have shown the crucial role of the terrestrial ecosystems as regulators of climate and emphasised both the long-term net impacts of aerosols on clouds and precipitation. Furthermore, the iLEAPS community has drawn attention to the importance of realistic land-use representation in land surface modelling and to that of other feedback processes and regional characteristics in current climate models and recommended actions to improve them.

Human influence has always been an important part of iLEAPS science but in Phase II (2014-2024), iLEAPS will move further towards bridging the gap between socioeconomics and natural sciences to shed light on research questions advancing global sustainability. Phase II will see the foundation of new types of research groups such as the Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX) that will include large-scale, long-term, coordinated observations and modelling in the Pan Eurasian region, especially to cover ground base, airborne and satellite observations together with global and regional models to find out different forcing and feedback mechanisms in the changing climate, taking into account the simultaneous societal and cultural change. PEEX is coordinated by the iLEAPS-Eurasia Office, run by  Hanna Lappalainen and Tuukka Petäjä.