International Research Fellowship Program: Agriculture, Climate, and the Carbon Cycle

Tubiello, Francesco N, Arlington VA

Investigators

Abstract

0107320 Tubiello The International Research Fellow Awards Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month postdoctoral research fellowship by Dr. Francesco N. Tubiello to work with Dr. Gunther Fischer at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Working with Dr. Fischer, who directs the Land Use Change Unit at IIASA, Dr. Tubiello will investigate the impacts of agricultural practices on regional climate and the carbon cycle. They will develop an interactive agricultural component for a general circulation model (GCM) using the Goddard Institute for Space Studies-CGM and the IIASA global agro-ecological zone model, GAEZ. This will provide a coupled global climate-agricultural model, with simplified rules for crop management, such as planting and harvesting schedules and water applications and a set of simulations focusing on the regional scale, to investigate the interactions among climate, carbon sequestration, and agricultural land use. IIASA is an international research institute. The necessary datasets and model for this project were developed there and are now housed at IIASA.