Discussion Points for 2022/08/10 Group Meeting

[nocollier]

• Progress on soil moisture in high latitudes? @jiafumao
• I have reviewed @ypwong22 pull request which includes some changes to the ILAMB library. We need to step through this carefully as there is some logic which assumes things like noleap calendars which won't work on other models.
• Are our biomass datasets consistently reporting carbon and not total biomass? See confirm biomass units as carbon versus biomass? #35 which @ckoven brings up. It seems the new ESACCI product is total which would explain the factor of ~2 difference in the comparison plots. We should check our other products, volunteers?
• I have re-encoded the NCSCD data to produce two products cSoil and cSoilAbove1m. There is a difference in this and the NCSCDV22 product that we encoded long ago, seems to be from interpolation. Is the spatial variability so high that we shouldn't regrid?
• There are other datasets available as per this ESSD paper. Should we chase these down and encode?

[jiafumao]

@nocollier , yes, we'll be presenting some initial comparisons between CESM and other products during the ilamb meeting this afternoon.

[nocollier]

Followup

Biomass:

• review our biomass data products, do they represent above ground biomass or total? carbon or total biomass?
• restore the Geocarbon and get the new Saatchi dataset
• which models have cStem? how does this change our biomass comparisons?
• loop in @mmu2019 as he and Jim looked at a lot of this a while back

Soil Carbon:

• loop in @umishra1226 to this discussion
• We have several datasets encoded, there are others in this ESSD paper, but there is a lot of variance. What products are recommended for our purpose of confronting models?

[nocollier]

Update on soil carbon.

• Umakant provided a perspective that none of the soil carbon products are 'best'
• In terms of spatial distribution, the SoilGrids250 product is somewhat better but not good
• Merging a number of products that do not curate sites for the type of soil carbon will not produce a better estimate
• The soil carbon WG will look at generating a new product with this curation