Spark is currently providing grants to the modeling teams below as part of WIEMIP, a coordinated, global effort to improve projections of Warming-Induced Emissions and ensure that these emissions are reflected in key policy and planning processes. WIEMIP involves more than 20 modeling teams from around the globe, not all of which are receiving direct grant funding from Spark. A list of all participating models and working groups is available here.
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Principal Investigator: Eren Bilir
Co-Principal Investigator: Anthony Bloom
Summary: CARDAMOM-JPL is a Bayesian model-data fusion framework developed to support NASA Earth science via multi-sensor integration within a mechanistic and physics-based land model framework. Though CARDAMOM-JPL has demonstrated applications in quantifying warming-induced emissions and feedbacks in the contemporary era-- including wetland CO2/CH4 feedbacks, fire and biomass forecasts, and evaluation of global drivers of land-sink variability-- its approach to estimating initial conditions from contemporary observations has placed it in different research space than bottom-up TBMs, which typically leverage a spin-up protocol. As a result, CARDAMOM-JPL and bottom-up TBMs both explore sensitivities of complex environmental process routines, but embark on fundamentally different modeling experiments to do so (different timescales, initial condition assumptions, baseline conditions, etc), obscuring clear interpretation of how the observational record embedded in CARDAMOM impacts estimation of future trajectories. Funded participation in WIE-MIP enables the development of novel spin up protocols and other compatibility adaptations to partially bridge the gap and support closer comparisons between data-aware frameworks like CARDAMOM and traditional bottom-up land surface models. We emphasize that CARDAMOM remains a complementary approach to bottom-up modeling due to its sparse mechanistic structure and coarse time step—both required due to the high computational cost of parameter inversion-- and cannot capture all relevant feedbacks. Nevertheless, we anticipate unprecedented insights on how remote-sensing-based parameter calibration, anchored to contemporary land surface dynamics, influences inferences of ecosystem sensitivity and centennial-scale evolution across represented routines.
Principal Investigator: Eleanor Burke
Co-Principal Investigator: Chris Jones
Co-Principal Investigator: Dan Hooke
Summary: The Met Office is working very closely with University of Exeter to provide driving climate data for the land models participating in WIEMIP. Data is produced using a pattern scaling technique within the PRIME modelling framework (Mathison et al, 2025: doi:10.5194/gmd-18-1785-2025). This provides the meteorology data for all the land models in WIEMIP to run the 1% idealised/factorial feedback simulations and the historical/scenario/overshoot simulations. We will also run and provide output from the JULES land surface model using a configuration which includes dynamic vegetation, nitrogen cycle, fire, permafrost, wetland methane emissions and BVOCs. This will enable us to participate fully in a range of studies which quantify the role of Warming Induced Emissions to carbon cycle feedbacks, remaining carbon budgets and the ability of the Earth System to reverse temperature rises under negative emissions/overshoot scenarios.
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Institution: Woodwell Climate Research Center
Principal Investigator: Elchin Jafarov
Co-Principal Investigator: Helene Genet
Co-Principal Investigator: Brendan Rogers
Summary: This project will investigate how delayed autumn soil freeze-up influences soil respiration across tundra and boreal ecosystems using model outputs from the WIEMIP. While the effects of warming and deeper summer thaw on soil carbon emissions are widely studied, the role of prolonged unfrozen soil conditions during autumn remains less well understood. A delayed freeze-up can extend the period when liquid water and above-freezing temperatures support microbial decomposition, potentially producing substantial late-season carbon dioxide emissions from carbon-rich soils. We will analyze monthly and, where available, higher-frequency outputs from participating land-surface and ecosystem models, including soil temperature, liquid soil water, freeze–thaw timing, active-layer depth, heterotrophic respiration, and total ecosystem respiration. The analysis will quantify relationships between autumn freeze-up dates and late-season respiration across models, climate conditions, and northern wetland regions. Years with anomalously late freeze-up will be compared with years characterized by deeper summer thaw but earlier autumn freezing to separate the effects of maximum thaw depth from those of an extended unfrozen season. The study will identify the physical and biogeochemical mechanisms responsible for late-season respiration pulses, evaluate their consistency across models, and determine how model differences in soil thermal dynamics, hydrology, carbon pools, and nutrient constraints affect simulated responses. The results will clarify whether delayed freeze-up represents an important and potentially underestimated control on cold-region carbon emissions.
Principal Investigator: Dave Lawrence
Co-Principal Investigator: Will Wieder
Co-Principal Investigator: Sean Swenson
Summary: The goals of is activity include fast-tracking an offline (land only) model intercomparison project to estimate warming-induced greenhouse gas emissions. NSF-NCAR will run simulations with the Community Land Model version 6 (CLM6) for idealized 1% CO2 simulations (1850-2000), a historical simulation (1850-2023) , and eight projection scenarios (2024-2300). CLM is the terrestrial component of the Community Earth System Model (CESM). Default simulations for WIEMIP will be done with the hillslope hydrology configuration of CLM, which simulates prognostic wetland extent that influences terrestrial methane fluxes.
Institution: Columbia University
Principal Investigator: Paul Lerner
Co-Principal Investigator: Ensheng Weng
Co-Principal Investigator: Igor Aleinov
Summary: Our project involves implementation of experimental protocols to estimate the warming-induced changes in emissions GHGs emissions from natural vegetations. Protocols include idealized 1%-CO2 simulations, forced by changing CO2 and changing CO2 + climate, to constrain carbon cycle feedbacks related to natural vegetation, and factorial runs to evaluate process-level contributions to these feedbacks. They also include an overshoot protocol to evaluate the respones of natural vegetation emissions to various stabilization pathways. Protocols are carried out using the Biome Ecological strategy simulator (bBomeE). BiomeE includes vegetation demographic processes, fully coupled ecosystem carbon and nitrogen cycles, and the effects of fire on vegetation. CO2 fluxes (e.g., GPP, autotrophic respiration, and heterotrophic respiration) have been evaluated using the FLUXNET network. Additionally, a large variety of ecosystem components have been evaluated against observations, including leaf-area index against MODIS LAI, GPP against a neural-network estimates that predict GPP based on remote-sensing data, tree height against canopy height derived from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System aboard ICESat biomass, and soil carbon against a globally gridded forest biomass product derived from a compilation from assessments by FAO, MCPFE, and UNECE (Weng et al., 2022 and reference therein). More recently, BiomeE has included both N2O emissions as a fraction of mineral nitrogen loss, though these emissions have yet to be evaluated, and CH4 emissions from saturated soils.
Institution: University of Bern
Principal Investigator: Benjamin David Stocker
Co-Principal Investigator: Frerk Pöppelmeier
Co-Principal Investigator: Hyuna Kim
Summary: LPX-Bern will contribute mature, extensively benchmarked terrestrial greenhouse-gas modelling to WIE-MIP, while funding sustains expertise and MIP participation.
Institution: Western Sydney University
Principal Investigator: Ben Smith
Co-Principal Investigator: Belinda Medlyn
Summary: WIEMIP brings together international biosphere modelling teams to improve projections of Warming-Induced Emissions and ensure that these emissions are reflected in key policy and planning processes. This work is intended to help create a more accurate picture of global emissions and carbon budgets, clarifying how much ambition is truly needed to close the gap on mitigation, greenhouse gas removal, and adaptation. LPJ-GUESS is a comprehensive, process-based climate-ecosystem model based on a detailed dynamic representation of vegetation demographic structure and dynamics. It is a well-established tool used worldwide in research and assessments of regional and global impacts of climate and land use change on terrestrial ecosystems. In WIEMIP our team contributes simulations with a particular focus on wetlands and methane, wildfires, forest and soil carbon and greenhouse gases.
Principal Investigator: Susan (Shufen) Pan
Summary: This project will contribute the Dynamic Land Ecosystem Model (DLEM) to the Warming-Induced Emissions Model Intercomparison Project (WIE-MIP) to quantify greenhouse gas emissions and climate feedbacks triggered or amplified by global warming. DLEM is a process-based terrestrial ecosystem model that integrates vegetation dynamics, soil biogeochemistry, hydrology, natural disturbances, and land management to simulate coupled carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles from site to global scales. A particular strength of DLEM is its integrated representation of CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O fluxes across natural and managed ecosystems, together with wildfire, freeze–thaw dynamics, wetlands, agriculture, and inland-water processes. We will conduct WIE-MIP factorial simulations to quantify the magnitude, spatial patterns, and underlying mechanisms of warming-induced greenhouse gas emissions, with particular attention to terrestrial CO2 fluxes, wetland CH₄, soil N₂O, and wildfire emissions. The experiments will distinguish direct biogeochemical responses to warming from indirect effects mediated by changes in hydrology, vegetation, and nitrogen cycling. DLEM’s land–aquatic coupling will further allow us to investigate whether warming-enhanced mobilization and lateral transport of terrestrial carbon and nitrogen generate additional CO₂, CH₄, and N₂O emissions from inland waters. The project will deliver standardized, FAIR model outputs for WIE-MIP synthesis and advance understanding of multi-GHG warming feedbacks, their underlying mechanisms, and their potential to amplify future climate change.
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Principal Investigator: Thomas Gasser
Summary: We will update and expand the emulation of WIE processes in the OSCAR reduced-complexity Earth system model using the WIEMIP simulations. This will enable fully coupled simulations in which the WIE feedback loop will interactively impact and be influenced by other components of the climate system. We use this upgraded model to run a large range of scenarios, including the standard CMIP7 scenarios.
Principal Investigator: Philippe Ciais
Co-Principal Investigator: Yi Xi
Co-Principal Investigator: Jullien Alleon
Summary: This project will contribute ORCHIDEE simulations of WIE for an advanced version covering high latitude / permafrost processes of Yedoma, peat deep carbon and conventional holocene soils and ORCHIDEE simulations for a version including high latitude extreme fires / optional with ORCHIDEE version including tropical forest dieback from drought by hydraulic failure.
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