I was working for three years at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany in Sönke Zaehle’s group. I was involved in Sönke’s ERC project, where we were developing a new land surface model ‘QUantifying Interactions between terrestrial Nutrient CYcles and the climate system’, QUINCY.
Here I want to list some of the main features of the QUINCY model, as presented in Thum et al. (2019):
- Fully coupled carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, water and energy cycles
- Modular model structure enabling different level of detail at different spatial scales
- Both canopy and soil processes are described in a vertical structure
- New diagnostic variables are included, such as leaf chlorophyll content and isotopes (13C,14C, 15N)
Additionally some novel ecophysiological knowledge has been included in the model, such as some acclimation processes and the possibility of the photosynthesis to be either sink or source limited.
A further model development paper around the QUINCY framework has been the Jena Soil Model (JSM) paper by Yu et al. (2020), where they introduce an optional soil model including microbes.
The QUINCY model is being implemented to the Max Planck Institute’s Earth System model, ICON ESM.
References
Thum, T. et al., Geosci. Model Dev., 12, 4781–4802, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-4781-2019, 2019.
Yu, L. et al., Geosci. Model Dev., 13, 783–803, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-783-2020, 2020.