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Published on: October 21, 2016
Increasingly negative tropical water-interannual CO2 growth rate coupling
Laibao Liu1, Philippe Ciais2, Mengxi Wu3
1Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. laibao.liu@env.ethz.ch.
Tropical water availability, not just temperature, increasingly controls the terrestrial carbon cycle. This shift impacts carbon dioxide removal and climate feedback predictions, with models failing to capture this intensifying water-carbon coupling.
Area of Science:
- Earth System Science
- Climate Science
- Ecology
Background:
- Terrestrial ecosystems absorb a significant portion of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
- Predicting future land carbon sink behavior under climate change is challenging due to uncertainties in carbon-climate feedbacks.
- Interannual variations in the atmospheric CO2 growth rate (CGR) offer insights into land-atmosphere carbon fluxes, particularly in the tropics.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the changing interannual relationship between tropical climate conditions and CGR.
- To assess the influence of water availability versus temperature on CGR variability.
- To evaluate the performance of Earth System and Land Surface models in simulating these relationships.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of global atmospheric CO2 data.
- Utilized terrestrial water storage and precipitation records.
- Compared relationships between 1960-1989 and 1989-2018 to identify changes under a changing climate.
Main Results:
- The link between tropical water availability and CGR has strengthened and become more negative from 1989-2018 compared to 1960-1989.
- This intensifying coupling may stem from altered tropical water availability patterns linked to El Niño/Southern Oscillation shifts.
- Most advanced climate models fail to accurately reproduce the observed intensification of water-carbon coupling.
Conclusions:
- Tropical water availability is emerging as a dominant factor in the interannual variability of the terrestrial carbon cycle.
- The findings highlight a critical modulation of tropical terrestrial carbon-climate feedbacks by water availability.
- Current models require improvement to capture the dynamic interplay between water, carbon, and climate.
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