ESA BIOMASS: From AGB to Terrestrial Carbon Cycle

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.

The presentation by Nuno Carvalhais (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena) highlights challenges in coupling climate and carbon cycle models, focusing on uncertainties in cloud feedbacks, ocean heat uptake, and land carbon processes. It stresses the divergent outcomes of current models and the importance of integrating observations like eddy covariance fluxes and biomass data. Bridging models with multi-scale data is presented as key to improving predictions of climate–carbon interactions and future climate extremes.