Extreme events driving year-to-year differences in gross primary productivity across the US

Creators: Turner, Alexander J.; Köhler, Philipp; Magney, Troy S.; Frankenberg, Christian; Fung, Inez; Cohen, Ronald C.

Abstract

Solar-Induced chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF) has previously been shown to strongly correlate with gross primary productivity (GPP), however this relationship has not yet been quantified for the recently launched TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). Here we use a Gaussian mixture model to develop a parsimonious relationship between SIF from TROPOMI and GPP from flux towers across the conterminous United States (CONUS). The mixture model indicates the SIF-GPP relationship can be characterized by a linear model with two terms. We then estimate GPP across CONUS at 500-m spatial resolution over a 16-day moving window. We find that CONUS GPP varies by less than 4% between 2018 and 2019. However, we observe four extreme precipitation events that induce regional GPP anomalies: drought in west Texas, flooding in the midwestern US, drought in South Dakota, and drought in California. Taken together, these events account for 28% of the year-to-year GPP differences across CONUS.

Additional Information

Published Online: Tue, 22 Sep 2020. We are grateful to the team that has realized the TROPOMI instrument, consisting of the partnership between Airbus Defence and Space, KNMI, SRON, and TNO, commissioned by NSO and ESA. We acknowledge the following AmeriFlux sites for their data records: US-ALQ, US-ARM, US-Bi1, US-Bi2, US-CF1, US-CF2, US-CF3, US-CF4, US CS1, US-CS2, US-CS3, US-EDN, US-GLE, US-Hn2, US-Hn3, US-Ho1, US-JRn, US-Jo2, US-KS3, US-Los, US-Me2, US-Me6, US-Men, US-Mpj, US-MtB, US-Myb, US-NC2, US NC3, US-NC4, US-Rls, US-Rms, US-Ro4, US-Ro5, US-Ro6, US-Rwf, US-Rws, US-SRG, US-SRM, US-Seg, US-Ses, US-Sne, US-Snf, US-Syv, US-Ton, US-Tw1, US-Tw4, US-Tw5, US-UMd, US-Var, US-Vcm, US-Vcp, US-WCr, US-Whs, US-Wjs, US-Wkg, US-xAB, US xBR, US-xCP, US-xDC, US-xDL, US-xHA, US-xJE, US-xJR, US-xKA, US-xKZ, US xNG, US-xNQ, US-xRM, US-xSE, US-xSL, US-xSP, US-xSR, US-xST, US-xTE, US-xUK, US-xUN, US-xWD, US-xWR, US-xYE. In addition, funding for AmeriFlux data resources was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. Funding: AJT was supported as a Miller Fellow with the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley. This research was funded by grants from the Koret Foundation and NASA 80NSSC19K0945 for support of the computational resources. Part of this research was funded by the NASA Carbon Cycle Science program (grant NNX17AE14G). TROPOMI SIF data generation by PK and CF is funded by the Earth Science U.S. Participating Investigator program (grant NNX15AH95G). This research used the Savio computational cluster resource provided by the Berkeley Research Computing program at the University of California, Berkeley (supported by the UC Berkeley Chancellor, Vice Chancellor for Research, and Chief Information Officer). Author contributions: AJT wrote the text with feedback from all authors. PK and CF performed the TROPOMI SIF retrievals. AJT downscaled the SIF data, conducted the AmeriFlux analysis, and drafted the figures. All authors contributed to the discussion and analysis. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Data and materials availability: Daily gridded 500-m TROPOMI SIF and GPP data from February 1, 2018 through June 15, 2020 is temporarily available on Google Drive here: "https://bit.ly/2GHEOOq", and will be uploaded to ORNL DAAC at acceptance.

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