skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Impact of the 2015/2016 El Niño on the terrestrial carbon cycle constrained by bottom-up and top-down approaches

Journal Article · · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences
ORCiD logo [1];  [2];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6];  [7];  [7];  [8];  [8];  [9];  [10]; ORCiD logo [7];  [11];  [12];  [13];  [12];  [14];  [15] more »;  [3];  [16];  [17];  [18]; ORCiD logo [19];  [10];  [20];  [21];  [8];  [8];  [22];  [23];  [20];  [19];  [24];  [8] « less
  1. Ludwig Maximilians Univ. Munich, Munich (Germany); Lab. des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE), Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
  2. Univ. of Exeter, Exeter (United Kingdom)
  3. Boston Univ., Boston, MA (United States)
  4. Univ. de Toulouse, Toulouse (France)
  5. Centre Bordeaux Aquitaine, Villenave d'Ornon (France)
  6. Univ. of Victoria, Victoria, BC (Canada)
  7. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Canberra, ACT (Australia)
  8. Lab. des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE), Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
  9. Wuhan Univ., Wuhan (People's Republic of China)
  10. CNRS/Meteo-France/Univ. Federale de Toulouse, Toulouse (France)
  11. Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL (United States)
  12. Univ. of Bern, Bern (Switzerland)
  13. Institute of Applied Energy (IAE), Tokyo (Japan)
  14. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States)
  15. Environment and Climate Change Canada, Downsview, ON (Canada)
  16. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg (Germany)
  17. Ludwig Maximilians Univ. Munich, Munich (Germany); Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg (Germany)
  18. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States)
  19. Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena (Germany)
  20. Auburn Univ., Auburn, AL (United States)
  21. Univ. Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels (Belgium)
  22. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  23. Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter (United Kingdom)
  24. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States); Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Beijing (People's Republic of China)
+ Show Author Affiliations

Evaluating the response of the land carbon sink to the anomalies in temperature and drought imposed by El Niño events provides insights into the present-day carbon cycle and its climate-driven variability. It is also a necessary step to build confidence in terrestrial ecosystems models' response to the warming and drying stresses expected in the future over many continents, and particularly in the tropics. Here we present an in-depth analysis of the response of the terrestrial carbon cycle to the 2015/2016 El Niño that imposed extreme warming and dry conditions in the tropics and other sensitive regions. First, we provide a synthesis of the spatio-temporal evolution of anomalies in net land–atmosphere CO2 fluxes estimated by two in situ measurements based on atmospheric inversions and 16 land-surface models (LSMs) from TRENDYv6. Simulated changes in ecosystem productivity, decomposition rates and fire emissions are also investigated. Inversions and LSMs generally agree on the decrease and subsequent recovery of the land sink in response to the onset, peak and demise of El Niño conditions and point to the decreased strength of the land carbon sink: by 0.4–0.7 PgC yr–1 (inversions) and by 1.0 PgC yr–1 (LSMs) during 2015/2016. As a result, LSM simulations indicate that a decrease in productivity, rather than increase in respiration, dominated the net biome productivity anomalies in response to ENSO throughout the tropics, mainly associated with prolonged drought conditions.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1484986
Journal Information:
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, Vol. 373, Issue 1760; ISSN 0962-8436
Publisher:
The Royal Society PublishingCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 46 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

References (64)

Process contributions of Australian ecosystems to interannual variations in the carbon cycle journal May 2016
Evaluation of ecosystem dynamics, plant geography and terrestrial carbon cycling in the LPJ dynamic global vegetation model journal February 2003
20th century changes in carbon isotopes and water-use efficiency: tree-ring-based evaluation of the CLM4.5 and LPX-Bern models journal January 2017
SMOS-IC: An Alternative SMOS Soil Moisture and Vegetation Optical Depth Product journal May 2017
Increasing frequency of extreme El Niño events due to greenhouse warming journal January 2014
A new version of the CABLE land surface model (Subversion revision r4601) incorporating land use and land cover change, woody vegetation demography, and a novel optimisation-based approach to plant coordination of photosynthesis journal January 2018
Inferring CO 2 sources and sinks from satellite observations: Method and application to TOVS data journal January 2005
Improving the ISBA CC land surface model simulation of water and carbon fluxes and stocks over the Amazon forest journal January 2015
Vegetation greenness and land carbon-flux anomalies associated with climate variations: a focus on the year 2015 journal January 2017
Influence of El Niño on atmospheric CO 2 over the tropical Pacific Ocean: Findings from NASA’s OCO-2 mission journal October 2017
North American terrestrial CO2 uptake largely offset by CH4 and N2O emissions: toward a full accounting of the greenhouse gas budget journal March 2014
Harmonization of land-use scenarios for the period 1500–2100: 600 years of global gridded annual land-use transitions, wood harvest, and resulting secondary lands journal August 2011
Predicting carbon dioxide and energy fluxes across global FLUXNET sites with regression algorithms journal January 2016
The impact of lateral carbon fluxes on the European carbon balance journal January 2008
Modelling the passive microwave signature from land surfaces: A review of recent results and application to the L-band SMOS & SMAP soil moisture retrieval algorithms journal April 2017
Amazon drought and forest response: Largely reduced forest photosynthesis but slightly increased canopy greenness during the extreme drought of 2015/2016 journal February 2018
Variability of fire carbon emissions in equatorial Asia and its nonlinear sensitivity to El Niño: FIRE CARBON EMISSIONS IN EQUATORIAL ASIA journal October 2016
The Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), model description – Part 2: Carbon fluxes and vegetation dynamics journal January 2011
Recent increases in terrestrial carbon uptake at little cost to the water cycle journal July 2017
Competition between plant functional types in the Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (CTEM) v. 2.0 journal January 2016
Record-breaking warming and extreme drought in the Amazon rainforest during the course of El Niño 2015–2016 journal September 2016
Nonlinear ENSO Warming Suppression (NEWS) journal June 2017
Sources and delivery of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus to the coastal zone: An overview of Global Nutrient Export from Watersheds (NEWS) models and their application: GLOBAL EXPORT OF C, N, AND P TO COASTAL SYSTEMS journal December 2005
Global covariation of carbon turnover times with climate in terrestrial ecosystems journal September 2014
Contribution of semi-arid ecosystems to interannual variability of the global carbon cycle journal May 2014
Hydrologic resilience and Amazon productivity journal August 2017
History of El Niño impacts on the global carbon cycle 1957–2017: a quantification from atmospheric CO 2 data journal October 2018
Analysis of daily, monthly, and annual burned area using the fourth-generation global fire emissions database (GFED4): ANALYSIS OF BURNED AREA journal March 2013
Compensatory water effects link yearly global land CO2 sink changes to temperature journal January 2017
Global Carbon Budget 2017 journal January 2018
The use of the multi-model ensemble in probabilistic climate projections
  • Tebaldi, Claudia; Knutti, Reto
  • Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, Vol. 365, Issue 1857 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2007.2076
journal June 2007
ORCHIDEE-MICT (v8.4.1), a land surface model for the high latitudes: model description and validation journal January 2018
Impact of changes in diffuse radiation on the global land carbon sink journal April 2009
Variations in atmospheric CO2 growth rates coupled with tropical temperature journal July 2013
Evaluation of spatially explicit emission scenario of land-use change and biomass burning using a process-based biogeochemical model journal March 2013
On aggregation errors in atmospheric transport inversions journal March 2001
Sensitivity of tropical carbon to climate change constrained by carbon dioxide variability journal February 2013
Interannual extremes in the rate of rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1980 journal June 1995
Recent trends and drivers of regional sources and sinks of carbon dioxide journal January 2015
Representation of natural and anthropogenic land cover change in MPI-ESM: Land Cover in MPI-ESM journal July 2013
Comment on "Drought-Induced Reduction in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 2000 Through 2009" journal August 2011
Drought Sensitivity of the Amazon Rainforest journal March 2009
CO 2 surface fluxes at grid point scale estimated from a global 21 year reanalysis of atmospheric measurements journal January 2010
ENSO variability, teleconnections and climate change journal December 2001
Terrestrial mechanisms of interannual CO 2 variability : INTERANNUAL CO journal March 2005
Fire in the Earth System journal April 2009
Evaluating the Land and Ocean Components of the Global Carbon Cycle in the CMIP5 Earth System Models journal September 2013
Intensification of terrestrial carbon cycle related to El Niño–Southern Oscillation under greenhouse warming journal November 2017
The impact of alternative trait-scaling hypotheses for the maximum photosynthetic carboxylation rate ( V cmax ) on global gross primary production journal June 2017
Updated high-resolution grids of monthly climatic observations - the CRU TS3.10 Dataset: UPDATED HIGH-RESOLUTION GRIDS OF MONTHLY CLIMATIC OBSERVATIONS journal May 2013
The global NPP dependence on ENSO: La Niña and the extraordinary year of 2011: GLOBAL NPP AND ENSO: THE 2011 LA NIÑA journal July 2013
Was the extreme Northern Hemisphere greening in 2015 predictable? journal April 2017
CO 2 emissions from land-use change affected more by nitrogen cycle, than by the choice of land-cover data journal April 2013
Satellite passive microwaves reveal recent climate-induced carbon losses in African drylands journal April 2018
A dynamic global vegetation model for studies of the coupled atmosphere-biosphere system: DVGM FOR COUPLED CLIMATE STUDIES journal February 2005
MOD15A2H MODIS/Terra Leaf Area Index/FPAR 8-Day L4 Global 500m SIN Grid V006 null January 2015
MYD15A2H MODIS/Aqua Leaf Area Index/FPAR 8-Day L4 Global 500m SIN Grid V006 null January 2015
Supplementary material from "Impact of the 2015–2016 El Nino on the terrestrial carbon cycle constrained by bottom-up and top-down approaches" collection August 2018
Global Carbon Budget 2017 text January 2018
20th century changes in carbon isotopes and water-use efficiency: tree-ring-based evaluation of the CLM4.5 and LPX-Bern models text January 2017
Recent trends and drivers of regional sources and sinks of carbon dioxide text January 2015
Per-capita estimations of long-term historical land use and the consequences for global change research dataset January 2017
Predicting carbon dioxide and energy fluxes across global FLUXNET sites with regression algorithms text January 2016
Per-capita estimations of long-term historical land use and the consequences for global change research dataset January 2017

Cited By (5)

Drought: Progress in broadening its understanding journal December 2019
El Niño‐Southern Oscillation‐Induced Variability of Terrestrial Gross Primary Production During the Satellite Era journal August 2019
Satellite-observed pantropical carbon dynamics journal July 2019
New insights into the variability of the tropical land carbon cycle from the El Niño of 2015/2016 journal October 2018
Tropical forests did not recover from the strong 2015–2016 El Niño event journal February 2020

Linked Research (6)

Figures / Tables (6)

Table 1(p. 3)table Table 1
Table 2(p. 3)table Table 2
Figure 1(p. 4)figure Figure 1
Figure 2(p. 5)figure Figure 2
Figure 3(p. 6)figure Figure 3
Figure 4(p. 7)figure Figure 4

Similar Records

The impact of the 2015/2016 El Niño on global photosynthesis using satellite remote sensing
Journal Article · Mon Oct 08 00:00:00 EDT 2018 · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences · OSTI ID:1484986
+7 more
Benchmarking carbon fluxes of the ISIMIP2a biome models
Journal Article · Tue Mar 28 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · Environmental Research Letters · OSTI ID:1484986
+27 more
Response of Tropical Terrestrial Gross Primary Production to the Super El Niño Event in 2015
Journal Article · Mon Sep 24 00:00:00 EDT 2018 · Journal of Geophysical Research. Biogeosciences · OSTI ID:1484986
+2 more

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
carbon cycle
El Nino/Southern Oscillation
land-surface models
atmospheric inversions