Integration of Meteorological and Ecological Measurements

Recent developments in both environmental measurement technology and numerical modeling have cleared the way for integrative approaches to Earth system science. Modern Earth system models can now account for interactions and feedback between the atmosphere, oceans, the cryosphere, and ecosystems at global to regional scales and over timescales ranging from hours to decades or longer. In turn, such models call for integrated data fields from observations in each of these Earth system compartments as well as their interactions. The nature, spatial scale, and data structure of ecological measurements (soil and vegetation parameters, ecosystem–atmosphere exchange fluxes) are distinctly different from those of most meteorological measurements. This chapter summarizes the basic notions of ecological measurement networks and addresses the challenges of integrating data from ecological and meteorological networks.