Regional and seasonal partitioning of water and temperature controls on global land carbon uptake variability

Creators: Wang, Kai; Bastos, Ana; Ciais, Philippe; Wang, Xuhui; Rödenbeck, Christian; Gentine, Pierre; Chevallier, Frédéric; Humphrey, Vincent W.; Huntingford, Chris; O'Sullivan, Michael; Seneviratne, Sonia I.; Sitch, Stephen; Piao, Shilong

Abstract

Global fluctuations in annual land carbon uptake (NEEIAV) depend on water and temperature variability, yet debate remains about local and seasonal controls of the global dependences. Here, we quantify regional and seasonal contributions to the correlations of globally-averaged NEEIAV against terrestrial water storage (TWS) and temperature, and respective uncertainties, using three approaches: atmospheric inversions, process-based vegetation models, and data-driven models. The three approaches agree that the tropics contribute over 63% of the global correlations, but differ on the dominant driver of the global NEEIAV, because they disagree on seasonal temperature effects in the Northern Hemisphere (NH, >25°N). In the NH, inversions and process-based models show inter-seasonal compensation of temperature effects, inducing a global TWS dominance supported by observations. Data-driven models show weaker seasonal compensation, thereby estimating a global temperature dominance. We provide a roadmap to fully understand drivers of global NEEIAV and discuss their implications for future carbon–climate feedbacks.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 02 November 2020; Accepted 30 May 2022; Published 16 June 2022. We thank Dr. Martin Jung for his helpful comments on the manuscript and help in data preparation. We would like to thank the TRENDYv7 modelers for their simulations. We also thank Dr. Pieter Tans and Dr. Ed Dlugokencky for providing the CO2 mole fraction data. S.P. acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41988101), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (Grant No. 2019QZKK0208), and the Xplorer Prize. A.B., P.C., F.C., M.O., and S.S. acknowledge the support from the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative RECCAP2 project (contract no. 4000123002/18/I-NB). V.H. acknowledges the support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grants no. P400P2_180784 and P4P4P2_194464). Data availability: The net land carbon fluxes of CAMS atmospheric inversions are available at https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/cams-global-greenhouse-gas-inversion. The Jena CarboScope inversions results are available from the Jena CarboScope website http://www.BGC-Jena.mpg.de/CarboScope/. The simulations from TRENDY DGVMs are available at https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/trendy. The FLUXCOM ensemble of carbon fluxes is available at www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/geodb/projects/Data.php. Monthly gridded air temperature, precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration data from the Climatic Research Unit can be accessed at https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/. The reconstructed TWS dataset based on GRACE observations is accessible at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7670849. The CO2 mole fraction data from the Greenhouse Gas Marine Boundary Layer Reference of the NOAA ESRL is available at https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/mbl/data.php. Code availability: All computer codes for the analysis of the data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Contributions: S.P., P.C., A.B., and X.W. designed the study. K.W. performed the analysis. K.W., S.P., A.B., and P.C. drafted the paper with contributions by X.W., C.R., P.G., F.C., V.W.H., C.H., M.O., S.I.S., and S.S. P.C. and A.B. contributed equally to this work. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature Communications thanks Kirsten Thonicke and the anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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