Frans-Jan W. Parmentier, Arctic Climate Scientist

I am an ecohydrologist who studies the impact of climate change on Arctic-boreal ecosystems. The Arctic-boreal region is experiencing much faster warming than the rest of the planet, which is causing large changes to its hydrology – such as a loss of snow cover and more frequent droughts. These changes affect plant growth and permafrost thaw, which in turn may cause a large loss of carbon from these systems. Because this may lead to a release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere – possibly enhancing climate change – I study how and why the flows of water and carbon are changing.

In my research, I draw from a long experience in studying northern ecosystems in areas such as northeast Siberia, Greenland, Scandinavia and Svalbard. I use this broad field experience to derive new insights from satellite data and to advance model development. Besides my research activities, I am also active in public outreach as a regular columnist in the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen, and I have been awarded the Fægri memorial prize for popular scientific communication.

In the past few years, I have been leading the Norwegian-Swedish research project WINTERPROOF (2018-2023) where two PhD students of mine improved the representation of snow dynamics, plant hydraulics and soil biogeochemistry in the models CLM-FATES and LPJ-GUESS. One of the main outcomes of this project is a reduced uncertainty in model projections of arctic climate feedbacks. See my list of publications for more project outcomes.

In addition, I am a contributor to expert assessments of AMAP, a working group of the Arctic Council. I have coordinated chapters on the 2015 report on methane and the 2021 assessment on short-lived climate forcers, and was a contributing author on the SWIPA (2017) and Arctic climate change update 2021 reports.

I have worked at several research institutes in Scandinavia and the Netherlands in the past. I received my PhD in 2011 from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands for my dissertation on the drivers of greenhouse gas exchange from arctic tundra. I continued as a postdoc at Lund University in Sweden, where I studied how atmospheric warming from sea ice decline affects carbon cycle dynamics across the Arctic.

In 2016, I led a research project at the Norwegian Research Institute Nibio on the damaging impact of extreme winter events on ecosystem carbon exchange, which was followed by a research stay at UiT–The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. From 2018 to 2023, I had a shared research position between Lund University and the University of Oslo, heading the WINTERPROOF project. After the conclusion of this project, I continued full time at the University of Oslo.