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Abstract: Understanding global climate change and developing strategies for sustainable use of our environmental resources are major scientific and political challenges. In response to an announcement of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for a national Earth observation (EO) mission, the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and the JenaOptronik GmbH proposed the EO mission Carbon-3D. The data products of this mission will for the first time accurately estimate aboveground biomass globally, one of the most important parameters of the carbon cycle. Simultaneous acquisition of multiangle optical with Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) observations is unprecedented. The optical imager extrapolates the laser-retrieved height profiles to biophysical vegetation maps. This innovative mission will reduce uncertainties about net effects of deforestation and forest regrowth on atmospheric CO2 concentrations and will also provide key biophysical information for biosphere models. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The LPJ dynamic global vegetation and hydrology model with river routing is implemented on a compute cluster in order to reduce the overall computation time. In order to achieve this, a parallel algorithm had to be developed for the river routing part of the LPJ code. It can be shown that the run time of the parallel LPJ model scales well with the number of parallel tasks, even getting a super-linear speedup for 8–128 tasks. The sequential part of the model code can be estimated to be only 0.16%. This offers the opportunity, for example, to apply the model to find optimal climate change mitigation/adaptation paths requiring a multitude of subsequent simulation runs. The algorithm can also be used for networks with a different topology than river routing networks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]