February 01, 2022
Climate Change Impacts on High Latitude Carbon Assimilation
Reducing model uncertainty of gross primary productivity in the Arctic-Boreal region.
Gross primary productivity (GPP) in the Arctic-Boreal region is small but highly uncertain. Accurate model representation of GPP in the region is critical to understand trends in the regional and global carbon balance.
[Reprinted with permission from Rogers, A., et al. “Reducing Model Uncertainty of Climate Change Impacts on High Latitude Carbon Assimilation.” Global Change Biology 28 1222–1247 (2022). DOI:10.1111/gcb.15958.]
The Science
The Arctic-Boreal region (ABR) is a significant source of uncertainty in estimates of carbon uptake in terrestrial biosphere models, and reducing this uncertainty is critical for more accurate global carbon cycling estimates and understanding the region’s response to global change. Process representation and parameterization associated with gross primary productivity (GPP) drive a large amount of this model’s uncertainty, particularly within the next 50 years when the existing vegetation’s response to climate change will dominate regional GPP estimates.
The Impact
This study reviews current understanding and model representation of GPP in northern latitudes, focusing on three components—vegetation composition, phenology, and physiology—and how they are altered by climate change. This review highlights GPP prediction challenges in the region, but also focuses on unique opportunities for advancing knowledge and model representation, particularly through the combination of remote sensing and traditional boots-on-the-ground science.
Summary
The ABR has a large impact on global vegetation–atmosphere interactions and is experiencing markedly greater warming than the rest of the planet, a trend that is projected to continue with anticipated future emissions of carbon dioxide. The ABR is a significant source of uncertainty in estimates of carbon uptake in terrestrial biosphere models such that reducing this uncertainty is critical for more accurately estimating global carbon cycling and understanding the response of the region to global change. Process representation and parameterization associated with GPP drives a large amount of this model uncertainty, particularly within the next 50 years, where the response of existing vegetation to climate change will dominate estimates of GPP for the region.
This paper reviews current understanding and model representation of GPP in northern latitudes, focusing on vegetation composition, phenology, and physiology, and considers how climate change alters these three components. The paper highlights challenges in the ABR for predicting GPP and focuses on the unique opportunities for advancing knowledge and model representation, particularly through the combination of remote sensing and traditional boots-on-the-ground science.
Principal Investigator
Alistair Rogers
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Program Manager
Daniel Stover
U.S. Department of Energy, Biological and Environmental Research (SC-33)
Environmental System Science
[email protected]
Funding
This work was supported by the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Arctic (NGEE–Arctic) project, which is supported by the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program within the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, and through the DOE contract no. DE-SC0012704 to Brookhaven National Laboratory.
References
Rogers, A., et al. "Reducing Model Uncertainty of Climate Change Impacts on High Latitude Carbon Assimilation." Global Change Biology 28 1222–1247 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15958.