North America's net terrestrial carbon exchange with the atmosphere 1990–2009

Abstract

Abstract. Scientific understanding of the global carbon cycle is required for developing national and international policy to mitigate fossil-fuel CO2 emissions by managing terrestrial carbon uptake. Toward that understanding and as a contribution to the REgional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes (RECCAP) project, this paper provides a synthesis of net land–atmosphere CO2 exchange for North America over the period (1990–2009). This synthesis is based on results from three different methods: atmospheric inversion, inventory-based methods and terrestrial biosphere modeling. All methods indicate that the North America land surface was a sink for atmospheric CO2, with a net transfer from atmosphere to land. Estimates ranged from −890 to −280 Tg C yr−1, where the atmospheric inversion estimate forms the lower bound of that range (a larger land-sink) and the inventory-based estimate the upper (a smaller land sink). Integrating across estimates, "best" estimates (i.e., measures of central tendency) are −472 ± 281 Tg C yr−1 based on the mean and standard deviation of the distribution and −360 Tg C yr−1 (with an interquartile range of −496 to −337) based on the median. Considering both the fossil-fuel emissions source and the land sink, our analysis shows that North America was, however, a net contributor to the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere in the late 20th and early 21st century. The continent's CO2 source to sink ratio for this time period was likely in the range of 4 : 1 to 3 : 1.

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