Berkeley Water Center LDRD: Modeling Framework for Nutrient Cycling

This joint BWC-LBNL Earth Science Division project is supported through LBNL LDRD (Laboratory Directed Research and Development) funding and focuses on enhancing the ability to analyze local-to regional-scale water, nutrient, and elemental fluxes. The motivation for the effort is the need to predict and interpret the effects of climate, hydrology, and land-use change in areas where such predictions are critical, such as the Central Valley of California. The technical objective of the project is the development of a coupled modeling framework (using TOUGH2, TOUGHREACT, and CLM3.0) with reactive biogeochemical transport capabilities. Once developed, this new modeling capability will be used to address questions such as: What are the effects of regional climate change in California on the dynamics of the Nitrogen cycle in the Central Valley? This problem will be addressed through the coupled modeling of climate, infiltration, vegetation dynamics, microbial processes, chemical reactions, and chemical transport within the near-surface, vadose, and saturated zones on the scale of a hectare or less. The expected outcome of simulation studies with the new code is a better understanding of the Nitrogen cycle and how it will change under various future climate, land-use, and hydrologic change scenarios. In addition, this work will address problems associated with upscaling detailed model processes and results, modeling hydrobiological processes at watershed to regional scales, and using local data to constrain larger-scale (e.g., 1-km resolution) models.

Investigators will include faculty at UCB, LBNL scientists (including Curt Oldenburg, Norm Miller, Bill Riley and Carl Steefel), and two postdocs.