Abstract. Ground-level ozone (O3) is a major air pollutant that adversely affects human health and ecosystem productivity. Removal of troposphericO3 by plant stomatal uptake can in turn cause damage to plant tissues with ramifications for ecosystem and crop health. In manyatmospheric and land surface models, the functionality of stomata opening is represented by a bulk stomatal conductance, which is oftensemi-empirically parameterized and highly fitted to historical observations. A lack of mechanistic linkage to ecophysiological processes such asphotosynthesis may render models inadequate to represent plant-mediated responses of atmospheric chemistry to long-term changes in CO2,climate, and short-lived air pollutant concentrations. A new ecophysiology module was thus developed to mechanistically simulate land−atmosphereexchange of important gas species in GEOS-Chem, a chemical transport model widely used in atmospheric chemistry studies. The implementation not onlyallows for dry deposition to be coupled with plant ecophysiology but also enables plant and crop productivity and functions to respond dynamically toatmospheric chemical changes. We conduct simulations to evaluate the effects of the ecophysiology module on simulated dry deposition velocity andconcentration of surface O3 against an observation-derived dataset known as SynFlux. Our estimated stomatal conductance and dry depositionvelocity of O3 are close to SynFlux with root-mean-squared errors (RMSEs) below 0.3 cm s−1 across different plant functionaltypes (PFTs), despite an overall positive bias in surface O3 concentration (by up to 16 ppbv). Representing ecophysiology wasfound to reduce the simulated biases in deposition fluxes from the prior model but worsen the positive biases in simulated O3concentrations. The increase in positive concentration biases is mostly attributable to the ecophysiology-based stomatal conductance being generallysmaller (and closer to SynFlux values) than that estimated by the prior semi-empirical formulation, calling for further improvements in non-stomataldepositional and non-depositional processes relevant for O3 simulations. The estimated global O3 deposition flux is864 Tg O3 yr−1 with GEOS-Chem, and the new module decreases this estimate by 92 Tg O3 yr−1. Estimated global grossprimary production (GPP) without O3 damage is 119 Pg C yr−1. O3-induced reduction in GPP is 4.2 Pg C yr−1(3.5 %). An elevated CO2 scenario (580 ppm) yields higher global GPP (+16.8 %) and lower global O3depositional sink (−3.3 %). Global isoprene emission simulated with a photosynthesis-based scheme is 317.9 Tg C yr−1, which is31.2 Tg C yr−1 (−8.9 %) less than that calculated using the MEGAN(Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature) emission algorithm. This new model development dynamicallyrepresents the two-way interactions between vegetation and air pollutants and thus provides a unique capability in evaluating vegetation-mediatedprocesses and feedbacks that can shape atmospheric chemistry and air quality, as well as pollutant impacts on vegetation health, especially for anytimescales shorter than the multidecadal timescale.
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Evaluation of carbonyl sulfide biosphere exchange in the Simple Biosphere Model (SiB4)
Abstract. The uptake of carbonyl sulfide (COS) by terrestrial plants is linked tophotosynthetic uptake of CO2 as these gases partly share the sameuptake pathway. Applying COS as a photosynthesis tracer in models requires anaccurate representation of biosphere COS fluxes, but these models have notbeen extensively evaluated against field observations of COS fluxes. In thispaper, the COS flux as simulated by the Simple Biosphere Model, version 4(SiB4), is updated with the latest mechanistic insights and evaluated with siteobservations from different biomes: one evergreen needleleaf forest, twodeciduous broadleaf forests, three grasslands, and two crop fields spread overEurope and North America. We improved SiB4 in several ways to improve itsrepresentation of COS. To account for the effect of atmospheric COS molefractions on COS biosphere uptake, we replaced the fixed atmospheric COS molefraction boundary condition originally used in SiB4 with spatially andtemporally varying COS mole fraction fields. Seasonal amplitudes of COS molefractions are ∼50–200 ppt at the investigated sites with aminimum mole fraction in the late growing season. Incorporating seasonalvariability into the model reduces COS uptake rates in the late growingseason, allowing better agreement with observations. We also replaced theempirical soil COS uptake model in SiB4 with a mechanistic model thatrepresents both uptake and production of COS in soils, which improves thematch with observations over agricultural fields and fertilized grasslandsoils. The improved version of SiB4 was capable of simulating the diurnal andseasonal variation in COS fluxes in the boreal, temperate, and Mediterraneanregion. Nonetheless, the daytime vegetation COS flux is underestimated onaverage by 8±27 %, albeit with large variability across sites. On aglobal scale, our model modifications decreased the modeled COS terrestrialbiosphere sink from 922 Gg S yr−1 in the original SiB4 to753 Gg S yr−1 in the updated version. The largest decrease influxes was driven by lower atmospheric COS mole fractions over regions withhigh productivity, which highlights the importance of accounting forvariations in atmospheric COS mole fractions. The change to a different soilmodel, on the other hand, had a relatively small effect on the globalbiosphere COS sink. The secondary role of the modeled soil component in theglobal COS budget supports the use of COS as a global photosynthesis tracer. Amore accurate representation of COS uptake in SiB4 should allow for improvedapplication of atmospheric COS as a tracer of local- to global-scaleterrestrial photosynthesis.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10311395
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Biogeosciences
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 24
- ISSN:
- 1726-4189
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-6547-2021
