Title: Vegetation and Climate: How do biophysical feedbacks regulate climate extremes?
Lecturer: Prof. Diego Miralles (Ghent University, Belgium)
Inviter: Prof. Huiling Yuan
Time: Wednesday September 11, 2024 at 3:00 PM
Venue: Lecture Hall D101, School of Atmospheric Sciences
Abstract: This presentation will explore the complex feedbacks between land and atmosphere, particularly focusing on extreme events like droughts and heatwaves, which cause direct societal impacts, agricultural loss, forest mortality, and water scarcity. Key questions will be addressed: How do extreme meteorological conditions impact ecosystem evaporation? In what ways does vegetation regulate the atmospheric boundary layer, affecting the intensification and propagation of these extremes? How do these biophysical feedbacks contribute to the inflow of heat and moisture to downwind regions, potentially leading to the propagation of extreme events? What are the consequences of land feedbacks for human heat stress during extreme events? How can information on land conditions be used for the timely prediction of these events? The goal of this presentation is not to provide definitive answers to these questions, but rather to present new results from my team’s work that may help advance our collective understanding of land feedbacks and the role they play in climate.
Brief introduction to the speaker: Dr. Diego Miralles is (full) Professor in Hydrology and Climate at Ghent University, Belgium. His research career started in 2009 at the Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory of the USA Department of Agriculture (USDA, Washington D.C.). His original work focused on satellite retrievals of soil moisture and land–atmosphere fluxes. This work resulted in his PhD thesis: 'Evaporation in the Global Water Cycle: Analysing Land Evaporation Using Satellite Observations' (VU Amsterdam, 2011). It embraced the challenge to develop GLEAM, a global retrieval model of terrestrial evaporation solely based on satellite data which has been used in thousands of applications since then, ranging from agricultural studies to climate model benchmarking. In 2011, he moved to a faculty position as Lecturer at the University of Bristol (UK). His research expanded to embrace global ecohydrology and remote sensing, and yielded several articles in high-impact journals. In 2015, he became again affiliated to the VU Amsterdam and took an external professor position at Ghent University, where he became tenured in 2017. Over the past 10 years, his research team at Ghent University has consolidated as a lead research unit on the study of Climate Hydrology. This was enabled thanks to personal grants from the European Research Council (ERC) and the Dutch Scientific Council (NWO), and his leading role in projects from the European Space Agency (ESA), Horizon 2020, and the Belgian Federal Science Police Office (BELSPO), among others. At the present he is board member in GCOS and the Boussinesq Centre of Hydrology. His core scientific interests remain on the understanding of our hydrosphere as part of the Earth's global system, impacted by anthropogenic emissions and land use change, but also regulating a number of positive and negative feedbacks on climate. Overall, his research team aims to understand how the hydrosphere, biosphere and climate interact and the implications for current and future societies; specific emphasis is frequently on drought and heatwave events due to their devastating impact on socioeconomic and natural systems. He currently holds a prestigious ERC Consolidator grant, has (co)authored over 150 articles over the past 10 years, and is a Highly Cited Researcher according to Web of Science.