Future climate warming is expected to enhance plant growth in temperate ecosystems and to increase carbon sequestration. But although severe regional heatwaves may become more frequent in a changing climate, their impact on terrestrial carbon cycling is unclear. Here we report measurements of ecosystem carbon dioxide fluxes, remotely sensed radiation absorbed by plants, and country-level crop yields taken during the European heatwave in 2003. We use a terrestrial biosphere simulation model to assess continental-scale changes in primary productivity during 2003, and their consequences for the net carbon balance. We estimate a 30 per cent reduction in gross primary productivity over Europe, which resulted in a strong anomalous net source of carbon dioxide (0.5 Pg C yr(-1)) to the atmosphere and reversed the effect of four years of net ecosystem carbon sequestration. Our results suggest that productivity reduction in eastern and western Europe can be explained by rainfall deficit and extreme summer heat, respectively. We also find that ecosystem respiration decreased together with gross primary productivity, rather than accelerating with the temperature rise. Model results, corroborated by historical records of crop yields, suggest that such a reduction in Europe's primary productivity is unprecedented during the last century. An increase in future drought events could turn temperate ecosystems into carbon sources, contributing to positive carbon-climate feedbacks already anticipated in the tropics and at high latitudes.

For the period 1980-89, we estimate a carbon sink in the coterminous United States between 0.30 and 0.58 petagrams of carbon per year (petagrams of carbon = 10(15) grams of carbon). The net carbon flux from the atmosphere to the land was higher, 0.37 to 0.71 petagrams of carbon per year, because a net flux of 0.07 to 0.13 petagrams of carbon per year was exported by rivers and commerce and returned to the atmosphere elsewhere. These land-based estimates are larger than those from previous studies (0.08 to 0.35 petagrams of carbon per year) because of the inclusion of additional processes and revised estimates of some component fluxes. Although component estimates are uncertain, about one-half of the total is outside the forest sector. We also estimated the sink using atmospheric models and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (the tracer-transport inversion method). The range of results from the atmosphere-based inversions contains the land-based estimates. Atmosphere- and land-based estimates are thus consistent, within the large ranges of uncertainty for both methods. Atmosphere-based results for 1980-89 are similar to those for 1985-89 and 1990-94, indicating a relatively stable U.S. sink throughout the period.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) mission was selected by NASA's Office of Earth Science as the fifth mission in its Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program. OCO will make the first global, space-based measurements of atmospheric CO 2 with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to characterize sources and sinks of this important green-house gas. These measurements will improve our ability to forecast CO 2 -induced climate change. OCO will fly in a 1:15 PM sun-synchronous orbit, sharing its ground track with the Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua platform. It will carry high-resolution spectrometers to measure reflected sunlight in the molecular oxygen (O 2 ) A-band at 0.76 m and the CO 2 bands at 1.61 and 2.06 m to retrieve the column-averaged CO 2 dry air mole fraction, X CO 2 . A comprehensive validation and correlative measurement program has been incorporated into this mission to ensure that X CO 2 can be retrieved with precisions of 0.3% (1 ppm) on regional scales.

Abstract. Currently two polar orbiting satellite instruments measure CO2 concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere, while other missions are planned for the coming years. In the future such instruments might become powerful tools for monitoring changes in the atmospheric CO2 abundance and to improve our quantitative understanding of the leading processes controlling this. At the moment, however, we are still in an exploratory phase where first experiences are collected and promising new space-based measurement concepts are investigated. This study assesses the potential of some of these concepts to improve CO2 source and sink estimates obtained from inverse modelling. For this purpose the performance of existing and planned satellite instruments is quantified by synthetic simulations of their ability to reduce the uncertainty of the current source and sink estimates in comparison with the existing ground-based network of sampling sites. Our high resolution inversion of sources and sinks (at 8º x 10º allows us to investigate the variation of instrument performance in space and time and at various temporal and spatial scales. The results of our synthetic tests clearly indicate that the satellite performance increases with increasing sensitivity of the instrument to CO2 near the Earth's surface, favoring the near infra-red technique. Thermal infrared instruments, on the contrary, reach a better global coverage, because the performance in the near infrared is reduced over the oceans owing to a low surface albedo. Near infra-red sounders can compensate for this by measuring in sun-glint, which will allow accurate measurements over the oceans, at the cost, however, of a lower measurement density. Overall, the sun-glint pointing near infrared instrument is the most promising concept of those tested. We show that the ability of satellite instruments to resolve fluxes at smaller temporal and spatial scales is also related to surface sensitivity. All the satellite instruments performed relatively well over the continents resulting mainly from the larger prior flux uncertainties over land than over the oceans. In addition, the surface networks are rather sparse over land increasing the additional benefit of satellite measurements there. Globally, rather challenging satellite instrument precisions are needed to compete with the surface network (about 1 ppmv for weekly and 8° × 10° averaged SCIAMACHY columns). Regionally, however, these requirements relax considerably, increasing to 5 ppmv for SCIAMACHY over tropical continents. This points not only to an interesting research area using SCIAMACHY data, but also to the fact that satellite requirements should not be quantified by only a single number. The applicability of our synthetic results to real satellite instruments is limited by rather crude representations of instrument and data retrieval related uncertainties. This should receive high priority in future work.

An error was published in Global Change Biology 16:1451-1469 as the global rather than the regional NO-fluxes were listed. The estimated NO-fluxes from soils should be 0.70 to 1.04 AE 0.14 Tg year À1 for geographic Europe (J. Steinkamp and M.G. Lawrence: Improvement and evaluation of simulated global biogenic soil NO emissions in an AC-GCM. ACPD in review).

Approximately half of human-induced carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions are taken up by the land and ocean, and the rest stays in the atmosphere, increasing the global concentration and acting as a major greenhouse-gas (GHG) climate-forcing element. Although GHG mitigation is now in the political arena, the exact spatial distribution of the land sink is not well known. In this paper, an estimation of mean European net ecosystem exchange (NEE) carbon fluxes for the period 1998-2001 is performed with three mesoscale and two global transport models, based on the integration of atmospheric CO 2 measurements into the same Bayesian synthesis inverse approach. A special focus is given to sub-continental regions of Europe making use of newly available CO 2 concentration measurements in this region. Inverse flux estimates from the five transport models are compared with independent flux estimates from four ecosystem models. All inversions detect a strong annual Aerocarb experimentalists URL: http://aerocarb.lsce.ipsl.fr/ 94 Climatic Change (2010) 103: carbon sink in the southwestern part of Europe and a source in the northeastern part. Such a dipole, although robust with respect to the network of stations used, remains uncertain and still to be confirmed with independent estimates. Comparison of the seasonal variations of the inversion-based net land biosphere fluxes (NEP) with the NEP predicted by the ecosystem models indicates a shift of the maximum uptake period, from June in the ecosystem models to July in the inversions. This study thus improves on the understanding of the carbon cycle at sub-continental scales over Europe, demonstrating that the methodology for understanding regional carbon cycle is advancing, which increases its relevance in terms of issues related to regional mitigation policies.

Atmospheric CO 2 has increased at a nearly identical average rate of 3.3 and 3.2 Pg C yr −1 for the decades of the 1980s and the 1990s, in spite of a large increase in fossil fuel emissions from 5.4 to 6.3 Pg C yr −1. Thus, the sum of the ocean and land CO 2 sinks was 1 Pg C yr −1 larger in the 1990s than in to the 1980s. Here we quantify the ocean and land sinks for these two decades using recent atmospheric inversions and ocean models. The ocean and land sinks are estimated to be, respectively, 0.3 (0.1 to 0.6) and 0.7 (0.4 to 0.9) Pg C yr −1 larger in the 1990s than in the 1980s. When variability less than 5 yr is removed, all estimates show a global oceanic sink more or less steadily increasing with time, and a large anomaly in the land sink during 1990-1994. For year-to-year variability, all estimates show 1/3 to 1/2 less variability in the ocean than on land, but the amplitude and phase of the oceanic variability remain poorly determined. A mean oceanic sink of 1.9 Pg C yr −1 for the 1990s based on O 2 observations corrected for ocean outgassing is supported by these estimates, but an uncertainty on the mean value of the order of ±0.7 Pg C yr −1 remains. The difference between the two decades appears to be more robust than the absolute value of either of the two decades.

Crop varieties and management practices such as planting and harvest dates, irrigation, and fertilization have important effects on the water and carbon fluxes over croplands, and lack or inaccuracy of this information may cause large uncertainties in hydraulic and carbon modeling. Yet the magnitude of uncertainties has not been investigated in detail. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the performances of a process-based ecosystem model called ORCHIDEE-STICS (a coupled model between generic ecosystem model ORCHIDEE and the crop growth model STICS), against eddy-covariance observations of CO₂ and H₂O fluxes at five European maize cultivation sites. The results show that ORCHIDEE-STICS has a good potential to simulate energy, water vapor and carbon dioxide fluxes from maize croplands on a daily basis. The model explains 23–75% of the observed daily net ecosystem exchange (NEE) variance at five sites, and 26–79% of the latent heat flux (LE) variance. Similarly, 34–83% of the variance in observed gross primary productivity (GPP) is accounted for by the model. However, only 3–81% of the variance of observed terrestrial ecosystem respiration (TER) is explained. Therefore, simulating TER is shown to be much more difficult than GPP. We conclude that structural deficiencies of the model in the determination of LAI and TER are the main sources of errors in simulating carbon dioxide and water vapor fluxes. A group of sensitivity analyses, by setting different crop variety, nitrogen fertilization, irrigation, and planting date, indicate that any of these factors is able to cause more than 15% change in simulated NEE although the response of these fluxes to management parameters is site-dependent. Varying management practice in the model is shown to affect not only the daily values of NEE and LE, but also the total seasonal cumulative values, and therefore the annual carbon and water budgets. However, LE is found to be less sensitive to management practices than NEE. Multi-site evaluation of the model and sensitivity analysis with respect to management practices performed in this research provide important insights on the model errors for estimating carbon and water vapor fluxes over European croplands