The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay is organizing an Institute lecture on Monday, March 13, 2023.

The details of the lecture are given below:

Title: "Linkages Between the Water, Energy and Carbon Cycles in the Global Climate System"

Speaker: Prof. Dara Entekhabi, Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

About the speaker: Prof. Dara Entekhabi received B.S. (1983) and M.S. degrees (1985, 1988) in geography from Clark University, Worcester, MA, and Ph.D. degree (1990) in civil and environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. He is currently a Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT. He is the Science Team lead for NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission that was launched on January 31, 2015. His research includes terrestrial remote sensing, data assimilation, and coupled land–atmosphere systems modeling. Prof. Entekhabi is also a fellow of the AMS, AGU, and IEEE. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Abstract: The water, energy, and carbon cycles together maintain the climate system and support life on Earth. The cycles are intimately linked together. As a result, perturbations in one can affect the other cycles. How strongly or weakly they are linked determines how modifications of one cycle transfer to another. Earth System models inherently parameterize these linkages. Differences in parameterization approaches across modeling groups have resulted in large uncertainties in projecting global change. Earth-orbiting satellites can provide the global benchmark observational data sets that can be used to assess the parameterization of the linkages between the cycles. It is imperative that the benchmark data sets are formed based on observations alone and do not contain those model components that are themselves the subject of assessment. In this presentation, we address observational (model-free) global characterization of water exchange in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. This observations-only characterization forms a benchmark fingerprint that Earth System models need to reproduce. The ultimate result will be reduced discrepancy and uncertainty in projections of regional changes in the water, energy, and carbon cycles in a changing climate.