Enhanced regional terrestrial carbon uptake over Korea revealed by atmospheric CO₂ measurements from 1999 to 2017
Abstract
Understanding changes in terrestrial carbon balance is important to improve our knowledge of the regional carbon cycle and climate change. However, evaluating regional changes in the terrestrial carbon balance is challenging due to the lack of surface flux measurements. This study reveals that the terrestrial carbon uptake over the Republic of Korea has been enhanced from 1999 to 2017 by analyzing long‐term atmospheric CO₂ concentration measurements at the Anmyeondo Station (36.53°N, 126.32°E) located in the western coast. The influence of terrestrial carbon flux on atmospheric CO₂ concentrations (ΔCO₂) is estimated from the difference of CO₂ concentrations that were influenced by the land sector (through easterly winds) and the Yellow Sea sector (through westerly winds). We find a significant trend in ΔCO₂ of −4.75 ppm per decade (p < .05) during the vegetation growing season (May through October), suggesting that the regional terrestrial carbon uptake has increased relative to the surrounding ocean areas. Combined analysis with satellite measured normalized difference vegetation index and gross primary production shows that the enhanced carbon uptake is associated with significant nationwide increases in vegetation and its production. Process‐based terrestrial model and inverse model simulations estimate that regional terrestrial carbon uptake increases by up to 18.9 and 8.0 Tg C for the study period, accounting for 13.4% and 5.7% of the average annual domestic carbon emissions, respectively. Atmospheric chemical transport model simulations indicate that the enhanced terrestrial carbon sink is the primary reason for the observed ΔCO₂ trend rather than anthropogenic emissions and atmospheric circulation changes. Our results highlight the fact that atmospheric CO₂ measurements could open up the possibility of detecting regional changes in the terrestrial carbon cycle even where anthropogenic emissions are not negligible.
Additional Information
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Received: 30 June 2019; Revised: 14 January 2020; Accepted: 5 February. The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions. This study was supported by the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) Research and Development Program under grant KMI2018‐03711 and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean Government (MSIT; no. NRF‐2019R1A2C3002868 and NRF‐2019R1A2C2084294). The data at AMY and ULD was from the project funded by the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program 'Research and Development for KMA Weather, Climate, and Earth system Services—Development of Monitoring and Analysis Techniques for Atmospheric Composition in Korea' under grant 1365003041. Vanessa Haverd was supported from the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub, funded by the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program. We are grateful to Benjamin Poulter for providing LPJ model simulation results and Hayoung Park for editing the manuscript. Data Availability Statement: The atmospheric CO2 measurement datasets at AMY and ULD Stations are available at https://gaw.kishou.go.jp/ and from Haeyoung Lee (leehy80@korea.kr) through e‐mail request. The GIMMS NDVI is publicly available at https://ecocast.arc.nasa.gov/data/pub/gimms/3g.v1. MODIS NDVI and GPP are publicly available at https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod13c1v006 and https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mod17a2hv006. The TRENDY model simulation results are available from Stephen Sitch (S.A.Sitch@exeter.ac.uk) or Pierre Friedlingstein (p.friedlingstein@exeter.ac.uk) through e‐mail request. CarbonTracker results are publicly available at http://carbontracker.noaa.gov. ODIAC dataset are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.17595/20170411.001. The GEOS‐Chem model simulation results that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 102204
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200331-130807969
- KMI2018‐03711
- Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program
- NRF-2019R1A2C3002868
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- NRF-2019R1A2C2084294
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- 1365003041
- Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program
- Australian Government
- Created
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2020-03-31Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field