This year the American Geophysical Union annual meeting returns to New Orleans, LA but stays global with their rich virtual program from December 13 through 17. Join Future Earth online or on site as AGU brings together a diverse community of Earth and space scientists – including many of our Global Research Networks, and partners – during the largest international Earth and space science meeting in the world.

Is this list missing a poster session, presentation, event, or town hall associated with Future Earth? Please email Judit Ungvari with information.

Events

Opening Special Session
Urban KAN co-chair Xuemei Bai is Invited speaker at the opening special session U21B The Grand Transformation needed to address Climate Change. Other speakers of the session include Jane Lubchenco from the White House, Johan Rockstrom, and others.
Date/Time: 14 Dec Tuesday 9:30-11:30 Convention Center – Great Hall, Prow Main Stage
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/142564

Risk KAN: Compound Events social gathering
In association with the session Compounding climate extremes: mechanisms, diagnostics, and current and future impacts, the RISK KAN is co-organizing an evening social event also sponsored by a grant from the National Academies Gulf Research Program. Details of this are as follows:
Date/Time: 16 Dec 17:30-19:30
Location: Prince of Wales room at the Hilton Riverside New Orleans

International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) Project
IGAC reserved two in-person pods for networking about the IGAC Project, how to get involved, international atmospheric chemistry, air quality/climate change global issues, etc. See igacproject.org for more information.
Date/Time: 14 Dec Tuesday 14:30-15:00, Pod 2 at Convention Center Posters
Date/Time: 16 Dec Thursday 16:00-16:30, Pod 2 at Convention Center Posters
James Crawford (NASA and an IGAC co-chair) and H. Langley DeWitt (IGAC Director) will be there.

Sessions, Posters, and Presentations

Future Earth Townhall:
TH53C – Thriving Earth Exchange and Future Earth: Strengthening Transdisciplinary and Community Science Around the World

Friday, 17 December 2021
12:15 – 13:15
Convention Center – Room 348-349

Communities around the world need science to tackle pressing priorities related to environmental health, pollution, resilience and sustainability. AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange connects local community leaders and scientists, training them to work together to make a local impact. Since 2014, Thriving Earth Exchange has fostered over 145 community science projects involving nearly 300 scientists and 400 community leaders, but has done most of its work in the US.

To further advance the practice and impact of community science outside of the United States, AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange is partnering with Future Earth, the largest global network of researchers working on transdisciplinary and sustainability science. Future Earth’s global reach and firsthand experience piloting Thriving Earth’s community science approach – through Future Earth Australia’s community science initiative – demonstrate how Thriving Earth’s community science approach can be adapted in different country contexts to serve local communities.

This interactive hybrid session is designed for anyone interested in strengthening the connection between science and society. It will explore 1) the key principles of community and transdisciplinary science, 2) the experiences in and opportunities of internationalizing the Thriving Earth Exchange program.

PAGES
CoralHydro2k – CoralHydro2k, a project of the PAGES 2k Network, will have two poster sessions.

Session PP55C-0684 – The CoralHydro2k Database: a global compilation of coral δ18O and Sr/Ca records for reconstructing tropical hydroclimate over the Common Era: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/971149
Shallow-water corals provide annual to subannual -resolution climate reconstructions from normally data-scarce locations in the tropical to subtropical oceans, enabling us to extend the modern-day observational records back to the preindustrial era, contextualize anthropogenic climate change, and improve the skill of future climate projections. The majority of these coral-based reconstructions utilize oxygen isotope ratios (δ18O), a proxy that tracks the combined change in sea surface temperature (SST) and the oxygen isotopic composition of seawater (δ18Osw) and/or strontium-to-calcium ratios (Sr/Ca), which primarily track SST variability. Paired coral δ18O and Sr/Ca records can be combined to isolate δ18Osw variability, which like salinity reflects changes in the local hydrologic budget. Recently, the PAGES Ocean2k project used published coral records to reconstruct regional SST variability across the tropical oceans (Tierney et al., 2015, Abram et al., 2016). Building on this work, the PAGES CoralHydro2k team has compiled a more comprehensive, machine-readable, and metadata-rich network of paired coral δ18O and Sr/Ca records to help facilitate tropical hydroclimate reconstructions across recent centuries. The CoralHydro2k database currently contains 227 coral proxy records from 120 unique locations that are organized into seven tiers based on the availability of paired proxy data, temporal coverage, and record resolution. The metadata for the new database follows PACTs 1.0 recommendations (Khider et al., 2019), and the database is built using LiPD (McKay and Emile-Geay, 2016) with available R, MATLAB, and Python serializations. Here we describe the structure and spatiotemporal characteristics of this new database and outline a crowdsourced data-submission process to ensure active-curation of records and future updates to the database.
References:
Tierney et al. (2015), Paleoceanography, https://doi.org/10.1002/2014pa002717
Abram et al. (2016), Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19082
Khider et al. (2019), Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019PA003632
McKay & Emile-Geay (2016), Climate of the Past, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-12-1093-2016

b. PP15B-0915 – The CoralHydro2k Seawater δ18O Database: A Crowdsourced, FAIR-aligned Database of ‘Hidden’ Seawater Isotope Data: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/905014

Seawater oxygen isotope ratios (δ18Osw) provide powerful constraints on ocean circulation and ocean-atmosphere exchange processes. Observational δ18Osw data provide important information on the modern ocean and global water cycle and are an increasingly critical diagnostic tool for isotope-enabled climate models. They are also essential for the accurate calibration of δ18O-based hydrological reconstructions from paleo-oceanographic archives. A growing number of new δ18Osw datasets have been published during the last two decades, however, the lack of a centralized, actively-curated public data repository targeted to this data has limited their discovery and inclusion in new studies. Over the past year, the PAGES CoralHydro2k project has collected a number of these ‘hidden’ δ18Osw datasets to aid in our investigation of tropical hydroclimate variability and change using paired coral δ18O and Sr/Ca records. In recognition of the value of δ18Osw data to the broader ocean and climate science communities, we have collated these records into a new, machine-readable, and metadata-rich database consistent with FAIR data standards. Here, we present a summary of our crowdsourcing efforts and a description of the database to date. We welcome direct data submissions and/or recommendations for inclusion of published datasets via our online survey: https://fsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_094ofPIJKM5KNyC.

C-PEAT
Session 138233: B51C – Carbon Cycling in Global Peatlands: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/138233
Conveners: Alison Hoyt, Julie Loisel, Massimo Lupascu and Angela V Gallego-Sala

Peatland ecosystems play a fundamental role in the global carbon cycle and have the potential to sequester carbon over millennia. However, climate change, fire, drainage and deforestation are threatening their functioning as carbon sinks and altering the fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and dissolved organic carbon from these ecosystems.

In this session, we invite the global peatland community to present their research on the carbon cycle in intact and degraded peatlands across latitudes. Studies from a wide range of global peatlands, including temperate, tropical and boreal peatlands are welcome. We encourage studies including but not limited to laboratory and field experiments, flux measurements, remote sensing, microbial ecology, paleoecological studies and process-based or large-scale modeling. Efforts to understand current dynamics as well as studies exploring the past, present and future peatland responses to climate and land use change are welcome.

CVAS
Session 130744: NG51A – Climate Variability Across Scales and Climate States: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/130744
Conveners: Raphaël Hébert, Heather Andres, Mathieu Casado and Shaun Lovejoy

We welcome contributions that improve quantification, understanding, and prediction of climate variability in the past, present and future Earth system across space and timescales through case studies, idealized or realistic modeling, synthesis, and model-data comparison studies.

This session aims to provide a forum on:

• Characterization of climate dynamics using a variety of techniques (scaling and multifractal techniques and models, recurrence plots, variance analyses).
• Relationship between mean state changes, and higher-order moments of relevant climate variables, including extreme-event occurrence and predictability.
• Role of the ocean, atmosphere, cryosphere and land-surface processes in fostering long-term climate variability through linear – or nonlinear – feedbacks and mechanisms.
• Attribution of climate variability to internal and/or forced dynamics, including natural and anthropogenic forcing changes.
• Synchronization and pacing of glacial cycles through dynamical interaction of external forcing and internal variability.
• Characterization of the probabilities of extremes, including linkage between slow climate variability and extreme event recurrence.

PALSEA
Session 130821: PP51A – Past Climate, Ice Sheet and Sea-Level Changes: How Much, How Fast?: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/130821
Conveners: Juliet Sefton, Anna Ruth W Halberstadt, Roger Creel and Alessio Rovere

Our current understanding of the response of ice sheets and sea level to climate forcing is incomplete. Future mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet would have profound impacts on global coastlines, but large uncertainties remain regarding possible rates and mechanisms of rapid sea-level change. Projections of future land ice contribution to global sea level are directly informed by estimates of paleo-sea level and ice sheet retreat.

In this session, we invite contributions that present studies of past ice sheet and sea-level evolution, especially those that focus on episodes of rapid change. Of interest are studies that use geological proxies and/or modeling approaches to examine sea-level rise or sea-level fall. This session falls under the purview of PALSEA, a working group of the International Union for Quaternary Sciences (INQUA) and Past Global Changes (PAGES).

v. Integrative Activity – Thresholds and tipping points
Session 118397: PP35E – Tipping Points in the Earth System: different perspectives of all the relevant disciplines: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/118397
Conveners: Denis-Didier Rousseau, Niklas Boers, Helle Astrid Kjaer and Peter Ditelvsen

Several subsystems of the Earth may respond highly nonlinearly at critical levels of anthropogenic forcing. It is paramount to identify safe operating spaces for humanity and the planet in terms of critical forcing levels, in order to prevent harmful transitions to alternative, undesirable states of the Earth system. Mechanisms leading to such abrupt transitions are poorly understood, and further research is urgently needed.

Our session welcomes studies about subsystems that may exhibit abrupt transitions, and couplings between them, by focussing on paleoclimatic records and abrupt transitions therein. Particular interest is placed on empirical or modeling basis to study abrupt climatic transitions that have occurred in past warm and cold climates, assessing interactions between different Tipping Elements and the ecological and societal impacts of past abrupt transitions, extending existing concepts of statistical Early Warning Signals in paleoclimatic proxy records, and testing whether models adequately represent the observed past tipping events.

This session is sponsored by the PAGES Integrative Activity “Thresholds, tipping points and multiple equilibria in the Earth System”.

PAGES SSC Member sessions
Session 122723: GC55G – Mid-latitude air-sea interaction and inter-basin teleconnections under changing climate: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/122723
Conveners: Aixue Hu, Shoshiro Minobe and Bolan Gan

Air-sea interaction is an important driving mechanism for numerous weather and climate phenomena, such as extratropical and tropical cyclones, storm tracks, blockings, atmospheric circulation changes, IPV and AMV, etc. Teleconnections between different ocean basins through atmospheric and oceanic bridges on various timescales can magnify certain weather and climate events downstream. To better serve the broader community, a predictive understanding of these interactions and teleconnections ranging from seasonal to decadal timescales would greatly advance our capability of simulating and predicting these processes. It is also essential to find out whether these interactions and teleconnections in mid-latitudes would change under changing climate and how they would be affected by the internal climate mode variability.

In this session, we welcome abstracts studying the observed and model simulated mid-latitude air-sea interactions and the inter-basin teleconnections on multiple timescales and how the various external forcings, e.g., solar, volcano, anthropogenic forcing, would modulate these processes.

WCRP session
Session 124533: GC077 – Safe Landing Climates WCRP Lighthouse Activity: Avoiding Extreme Climate Risk: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/prelim.cgi/Session/124533
Conveners: Steven C Sherwood, Bette L Otto-Bliesner, Benjamin M Sanderson and Victor Brovkin

We invite scientific contributions relevant to the new Lighthouse activity which explores the routes to climate-safe landing spaces for human and natural systems. We solicit presentations focusing on limits to adaptation; metrics for dangerous climate change; and climate-related global tail risks, or high-impact events that could have significant consequences for humanity but are currently uncertain or poorly modelled.

Examples include triggering of carbon release; ice shelf/sheet collapse and sea level rise; regime shift of ocean or atmosphere circulation and clouds; multiplicative effect of compound hazards; biome (e.g. Amazon) collapse; “Fireball Earth”; and dangerous extremes that exceed our ability to adapt. We are also interested in climate and carbon cycle feedbacks in the context of negative emissions and the reversibility of the anthropogenic perturbation, and in changes that threaten large scale water availability or habitability of coasts. This session focus is on occurrences or events that have global-scale consequences.

Invited talk: Ricarda Winkelmann, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research “Interacting tipping elements increase risk of climate domino effects under global warming”.

Selected relevant sessions
Session 130397: PP43A – Climate of the Common Era: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/130397
Conveners: Sloan Coats, Bethany Coulthard, Elizabeth Jane Wallace and Hussein Sayani

This session highlights recent work on all aspects of the climate of the last 2000 years (the Common Era), using new proxy records, data syntheses, reconstruction methodologies, proxy system modeling, and paleoclimate model simulations. Contributions that combine several of the above areas or that utilize the latest generation of paleoclimate model simulations are particularly welcome. A focus of this year’s session will be past climate extremes (floods, droughts, heat waves, etc.). New means of reconstructing climate extremes, as well as model-data comparisons that seek to understand their characteristics and drivers, are particularly encouraged.

Session 117493: PP34B – Refinement of paleo-proxies in the GEOTRACES era: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/130860
Conveners: Christopher T Hayes, Kazuyo Tachikawa, Kassandra Costa and Jesse R Farmer

Our knowledge of the past ocean relies upon measurable quantities in the sedimentary record that represent past conditions. The development of these proxies is driven by linking relationships between processes in the modern ocean and the transfer of signals into preserved archives, ranging from bulk sediment to species-specific fossils.

The international GEOTRACES program has been surveying the global ocean distribution of trace elements and isotopes, many of which have specific paleoceanographic applications, including protactinium-thorium ratios and neodymium isotopes. Furthermore, the advancements GEOTRACES has made in the understanding of micronutrient metals, redox sensitive metals and nutrient isotopic ratios also have significant implications for our understanding of past ocean circulation, biological productivity, particle fluxes and climate.

In this session we welcome abstracts focusing on either modern or past ocean systems that speak to the development, calibration, or modeling of proxies and/or any associated updates to our proxy-based understanding of ocean conditions.

Session 130520: PP42A – High-resolution sedimentary archives and the detection of abrupt environmental changes: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/130520
Conveners: Francois Lapointe, Celia Martin-Puertas, Tobias Schneider and Pierre Francus

Sedimentary records with high deposition rates are pivotal to reveal regional climatic and environmental changes across the Earth. Although rare, annually laminated sediments are exceptional archives: they, 1) offer the possibility to document Earth’s environmental changes at unprecedented temporal resolution; 2) provide the means to constrain the chronologies of other archives; 3) can record information about the resilience of past societies based on physical, and biogeochemical evidence. However, acquiring sub-decadal proxy-records from such sedimentary archives can be challenging.

We welcome participants whose research documents recent advances in the analyses of highly resolved sedimentary records to detect climatic and environmental changes, including the use of hyperspectral imaging techniques and other cutting-edge high-resolution techniques (e.g., µXRF, SEM, CT-Scan). Particularly encouraged are researchers who combine the different techniques with newest computational techniques (e.g., machine learning). Furthermore, this session provides a platform to discuss new high-resolution paleoclimate (e.g., temperature, precipitation, flood) and environmental reconstructions.

RISK KAN

Sessions: Compounding climate extremes: mechanisms, diagnostics, and current and future impacts. GC51C and GC52A (talks), GC55D (posters). Talks 8:00-11:00 on 17 Dec in Room 206-207. Posters 16:00-18:00 on 17 Dec.
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/129652
Climate extremes occurring close together in time or space can pose amplified risks for societies, due to inter-relations among hazards and affected sectors. Examples include (i) multivariate extremes (same time and place); (ii) concurrent extremes (same time, multiple places); and (iii) sequential or preconditioned extremes (multiple times, same place). To understand their physical drivers and mitigate their impacts in a changing climate requires joint efforts from a broad range of scientific communities across disciplines and temporal and spatial scales — from local to global extent, synoptic to decadal variability, and hazard characterization to detailed risk and impact assessment. We invite contributions that aim to understand compound climate extremes through evaluation of their dynamical, hydrological, and/or land-surface mechanisms; that use innovative numerical modeling and/or statistical methods applied to models or observations to improve their detection, attribution, or projections; or that evaluate their impacts on specific human or natural systems.

Talk: Elevation-dependent projections of extreme heat stress changes in the contiguous United States. A31D-08. 8:35-8:40 on 15 Dec in Room 278-279.

Poster: A close relationship between atmospheric rivers and heat stress in the northern US. GC55H-0495. 16:00-18:00 on 17 Dec.

B52C – Past, Present, and Future of Water-Limited Dryland Ecosystems: Local Trends to Global Impacts I Oral
Friday, 17 December 2021 10:45 – 12:00
Convention Center – Room 228-230
Water-limited dryland ecosystems cover ~40% of the earth surface, host major centers of global plant diversity, support over one-third of the global human population – mainly in the developing countries – and represent a major uncertainty in the global carbon cycle. Many drylands are in transition zones that are vulnerable to future global change, such as drought and land degradation. However, consequences on global carbon and water budgets, ecosystem services, and sustainable livelihoods are still mostly unclear. In this session we seek to: i) highlight advances in our understanding of hydrological, biogeochemical, and ecological processes in water-limited environments; ii) investigate or predict the response of dryland ecosystems to changing climate, rising CO2, and different land use and management practices; and iii) provide perspectives on needs and directions for future research and environmental policy-making. Contributions from both modeling and experimental studies across a range of spatial and temporal scales are welcome.
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Session/138551

B21B-02 – Exploring the role of peak CO2 fluxes versus growing season length in controlling semiarid ecosystem net CO2 flux interannual variability (Invited)
Tuesday, 14 December 2021 09:10 – 09:15
Convention Center – Room 238-239
Recent studies have suggested that semiarid ecosystems play a dominant role in the interannual variability (IAV) in the global carbon (C) cycle. Moisture availability appears to be a key control of CO2 fluxes at annual scales; however, it remains unclear exactly which specific sub-annual time periods are driving semiarid CO2 flux IAV. Studies in mesic ecosystems have shown that it is the “most active” days – i.e. the days in which peak CO2 fluxes occur in response to favorable climatic conditions – that are most important in controlling net CO2 flux IAV. We may also expect this to be the case in semiarid regions given the “pulsed” nature of ecosystem processes in response to rainfall events. Here, we test this expectation by comparing the relative contribution of peak CO2 flux days versus growing season length (GSL) in driving net and gross CO2 flux variability. We perform this analysis at a network of 12 eddy covariance flux tower sites in the southwestern US spanning high elevation forested sites to low elevation shrub- and grasslands. Contrary to our expectation, we find that both the peak CO2 fluxes and the GSL are important in driving net CO2 flux IAV, particularly for the shrub and grassland sites. Higher elevation forested sites, which are typically a mean C “sink”, are mostly dominated by peak flux days. These results suggest that, at least for shrub and grass-dominated semiarid ecosystems, it is crucial not only to better understand the pulsed nature of ecosystem processes in response to rainfall events, but also to understand how moisture availability controls seasonal phenology. We expand on our analysis by exploring how the timing, duration, and magnitude of various climate variables are driving both peak CO2 fluxes and GSL. Our results help us to improve our understanding of semiarid ecosystem processes as well as their contribution to the role of semiarid ecosystems in driving global C cycle IAV.
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/874095
Abstract ID: 792742
Title: Effects of differences in aboveground dead organic matter types on the stand-scale necromass and CO2 efflux estimates in a subtropical forest in Okinawa Island, Japan
Session: B35B. Tropical Mountains and Forests: Connections in a Complex, Changing World I Poster