ESA BIOMASS: Exploratory Model-Data Integration Exercises

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 this exercise prepared by Siyuan Wang (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena) and presented by Nuno Carvalhais (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena), a simple dynamic carbon model to explore how parameters control carbon gain, loss, and storage is presented. It demonstrates parameter inversion using synthetic observations and optimization methods to estimate model parameters under different constraints. An extension shows how temperature stress can influence carbon productivity, linking the model to climate impacts.