Global and Brazilian Carbon Response to El Niño Modoki 2011–2010

Abstract

The El Niño Modoki in 2010 led to historic droughts in Brazil. In order to understand its impact on carbon cycle variability, we derive the 2011-2010 annual carbon flux change ( F ↑ ) globally and specifically to Brazil using the NASA Carbon Monitoring System Flux (CMS-Flux) framework. Satellite observations of CO 2 , CO, and solar-induced fluorescence (SIF) are ingested into a 4D-variational assimilation system driven by carbon cycle models to infer spatially resolved carbon fluxes including net ecosystem production, biomass burning, and gross primary productivity (GPP). The global 2011-2010 net carbon flux change was estimated to be Plain Language SummaryWe quantify the global and Brazilian carbon response to 2010 El Niño using the NASA Carbon Monitoring System Flux (CMS-Flux) framework. Satellite observations of CO 2 , CO, and solar-induced fluorescence (SIF) are ingested into a 4D-variational assimilation system driven by carbon cycle models to infer spatially resolved carbon fluxes including net ecosystem exchange, biomass burning, and gross primary productivity (GPP). We show that CO 2 biomass burning from Brazil was both the dominant driver of net carbon exchange in Brazil and the dominant contributor to the global biomass burning from 2011-2010.

Sources of Uncertainty in Regional and Global Terrestrial CO2 Exchange Estimates

“…Pinatubo (Lucht et al, ; Mercado et al, ). Other years are associated with positive and negative phases of El Niño (Bastos et al, ; Bowman et al, ), suggesting a possible contribution to of mismatches in the response of DGVMs and inversions to ENSO.…”

Cropland Carbon Uptake Delayed and Reduced by 2019 Midwest Floods

“…We use the forward and adjoint components of the Greenhouse gas framework‐Flux model (GHGF‐Flux) for atmospheric chemical transport and flux inversion analysis. GHGF‐Flux is a flux inversion system developed within NASA's Carbon Monitoring System Flux project (Bowman et al, ; J. Liu et al, ). GHGF‐Flux inherits the chemistry transport model from the GEOS‐Chem and the adjoint analysis methods from the GEOS‐Chem‐adjoint.…”

Detecting drought impact on terrestrial biosphere carbon fluxes over contiguous US with satellite observations

“…Due to the highly linear correlations between SIF and GPP, SIF has been used as a proxy of GPP to investigate photosynthetic activities in a number of studies (Parazoo et al 2014(Parazoo et al , 2015. The SIF-GPP products used here are the same as in Liu et al (2017) and Bowman et al (2017).…”

“…Complementing studies using models and in situ measurements, satellite measurements of CO 2 provide a top-down constraint on the net exchange of carbon, and solar induced fluorescence provides a top-down estimate of photosynthesis, or GPP, allowing studying large regional climate anomaly impacts on the carbon cycle in new ways . We used the NASA Carbon Monitoring System Flux (CMS-Flux) inversion and optimization framework (Bowman et al 2017, Liu et al 2014, 2016 to quantify the impact of these two drought events on NBP, GPP, and R eco over CONUS. NBP and GPP were optimized independently, but consistently, through the assimilation of X CO2 and SIF from GOSAT (Frankenberg et al 2011).…”

“…NBP and GPP were optimized independently, but consistently, through the assimilation of X CO2 and SIF from GOSAT (Frankenberg et al 2011). Due to dense spatiotemporal coverage, satellite X CO2 observations have shown potential in quantifying the regional carbon flux interannual variability (e.g., Basu et al 2014, Detmers et al 2015, Bowman et al 2017, in spite of uncertainty in the absolute net flux estimates (e.g., Feng et al 2016). Within any 4°×5°grid box, there are annually ∼200 GOSAT X CO2 observations, with denser coverage over mid-latitudes (figure S1 is available online at stacks.iop.org/ERL/13/095003/ mmedia), providing increased spatial and temporal coverage relative to surface flask observations, albeit with lower accuracy.…”