Abstract Extreme climate events are becoming more frequent, with poorly understood implications for carbon sequestration by terrestrial ecosystems. A better understanding will critically depend on accurate and precise quantification of ecosystems responses to these events. Taking the 2019 US Midwest floods as a case study, we investigate current capabilities for tracking regional flux anomalies with “top‐down” inversion analyses that assimilate atmospheric CO2observations. For this analysis, we develop a regionally nested version of the NASA Carbon Monitoring System‐Flux system for North America (CMS‐Flux‐NA) that allows high resolution atmospheric transport (0.5° × 0.625°). Relative to a 2018 baseline, we find the 2019 US Midwest growing season net carbon uptake is reduced by 11–57 TgC (3%–16%, range across assimilated CO2data sets). These estimates are found to be consistent with independent “bottom‐up” estimates of carbon uptake based on vegetation remote sensing (15–78 TgC). We then investigate current limitations in tracking regional carbon budgets using “top‐down” methods. In a set of observing system simulation experiments, we show that the ability of atmospheric CO2inversions to capture regional carbon flux anomalies is still limited by observational coverage gaps for both in situ and satellite observations. Future space‐based missions that allow for daily observational coverage across North America would largely mitigate these observational gaps, allowing for improved top‐down estimates of ecosystem responses to extreme climate events.
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The reduced net carbon uptake over Northern Hemisphere land causes the close-to-normal CO 2 growth rate in 2021 La Niña
La Niña climate anomalies have historically been associated with substantial reductions in the atmospheric CO2growth rate. However, the 2021 La Niña exhibited a unique near-neutral impact on the CO2growth rate. In this study, we investigate the underlying mechanisms by using an ensemble of net CO2fluxes constrained by CO2observations from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 in conjunction with estimates of gross primary production and fire carbon emissions. Our analysis reveals that the close-to-normal atmospheric CO2growth rate in 2021 was the result of the compensation between increased net carbon uptake over the tropics and reduced net carbon uptake over the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. Specifically, we identify that the extreme drought and warm anomalies in Europe and Asia reduced the net carbon uptake and offset 72% of the increased net carbon uptake over the tropics in 2021. This study contributes to our broader understanding of how regional processes can shape the trajectory of atmospheric CO2concentration under climate change.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2017870
- PAR ID:
- 10541249
- Publisher / Repository:
- Science
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Advances
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 23
- ISSN:
- 2375-2548
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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