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Published March 2020 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Cropland Carbon Uptake Delayed and Reduced by 2019 Midwest Floods

Abstract

While large‐scale floods directly impact human lives and infrastructures, they also profoundly impact agricultural productivity. New satellite observations of vegetation activity and atmospheric CO₂ offer the opportunity to quantify the effects of such extreme events on cropland carbon sequestration. Widespread flooding during spring and early summer 2019 induced conditions that delayed crop planting across the U.S. Midwest. As a result, satellite observations of solar‐induced chlorophyll fluorescence from TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument and Orbiting Carbon Observatory reveal a 16‐day shift in the seasonal cycle of photosynthesis relative to 2018, along with a 15% lower peak value. We estimate a reduction of 0.21 PgC in cropland gross primary productivity in June and July, partially compensated in August and September (+0.14 PgC). The extension of the 2019 growing season into late September is likely to have benefited from increased water availability and late‐season temperature. Ultimately, this change is predicted to reduce the crop productivity in the Midwest Corn/Soy belt by ~15% compared to 2018. Using an atmospheric transport model, we show that a decline of ~0.1 PgC in the net carbon uptake during June and July is consistent with observed CO₂ enhancements of up to 10 ppm in the midday boundary layer from Atmospheric Carbon and Transport‐America aircraft and over 3 ppm in column‐averaged dry‐air mole fractions from Orbiting Carbon Observatory. This study quantifies the impact of floods on cropland productivity and demonstrates the potential of combining solar‐induced chlorophyll fluorescence with atmospheric CO₂ observations to monitor regional carbon flux anomalies.

Additional Information

© 2020 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. Issue Online: 25 March 2020; Version of Record online: 25 March 2020; Manuscript accepted: 05 February 2020; Manuscript revised: 03 February 2020; Manuscript received: 06 December 2019. Part of this research was funded by the NASA Carbon Cycle Science program (Grants NNX17AE14G and NNH16ZDA001N) and the NASA OCO‐2 Science Team (Grants 80NSSC18K0895 and NNH17ZDA001N). TROPOMI SIF data generation by P. K. and C. F. is funded by the Earth Science U.S. Participating Investigator program (Grant NNX15AH95G). Aircraft data is funded by the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport (ACT)‐America Earth Venture Suborbital mission (grant NNX15AG76G to Penn State). B. B.'s research was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, administered by Universities Space Research Association under contract with NASA. V.H. was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (P400P2_180784). Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High‐End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). Data Availability Statement: TROPOMI and OCO‐2 SIF products are accessed online (at https://data.caltech.edu/records/1347 (DOI: 10.22002/D1.1347) and https://oco2.gesdisc.eosdis.nasa.gov/data/OCO2_DATA/OCO2_L2_Lite_SIF.8r/). OCO‐2 XCO2 retrieval files are downloaded from Jet Propulsion Laboratory (https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov/). ACT‐America L2 in situ measurements can be downloaded from the ORNL DACC (https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1556). County‐level crop statistics is available at USDA NASS Quick Stats Database (https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov).

Attached Files

Published - 2019AV000140.pdf

Supplemental Material - aga20023-sup-0001-2019av000140-si.pdf

Supplemental Material - aga20023-sup-0003-2019av000140-peer_review_history.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023