ESA BIOMASS: Bridging Models and Observation

The 2024 BIOMASS Summer School (21–25 October, Jena) focused on biomass and the carbon cycle, with lectures and hands-on sessions on ESA’s BIOMASS mission, SAR remote sensing, and ecosystem monitoring. Hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, it brought together experts and early-career scientists to advance methods for measuring, modeling, and understanding global biomass dynamics.

In another presentation, Nuno Carvalhais (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena) discusses how models and observational data can be linked to better understand environmental processes. It explains challenges in model construction, parameterization, and uncertainties in forcing data, which often lead to ill-posed problems such as equifinality and lack of identifiability. Various strategies like optimization algorithms, Bayesian approaches, and the use of multiple constraints or priors are introduced to improve parameter estimation and model performance. Ultimately, the talk emphasizes that parameter estimation and data assimilation are central for bridging models with real-world observations.