Early snowmelt significantly enhances boreal springtime carbon uptake

We determine the annual timing of spring recovery from space-borne microwave radiometer observations across northern hemisphere boreal evergreen forests for 1979-2014. We find a trend of advanced spring recovery of carbon uptake for this period, with a total average shift of 8.1 d (2.3 d/decade). We use this trend to estimate the corresponding changes in gross primary production (GPP) by applying in situ carbon flux observations. Micrometeorological CO₂ measurements at four sites in northern Europe and North America indicate that such an advance in spring recovery would have increased the January-June GPP sum by 29 g⋅C⋅m^-2 [8.4 g⋅C⋅m^-2 (3.7%)/decade]. We find this sensitivity of the measured springtime GPP to the spring recovery to be in accordance with the corresponding sensitivity derived from simulations with a land ecosystem model coupled to a global circulation model. The model-predicted increase in springtime cumulative GPP was 0.035 Pg/decade [15.5 g⋅C⋅m^-2 (6.8%)/decade] for Eurasian forests and 0.017 Pg/decade for forests in North America [9.8 g⋅C⋅m^-2 (4.4%)/decade]. This change in the springtime sum of GPP related to the timing of spring snowmelt is quantified here for boreal evergreen forests.