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  • Accepted Manuscript: Global Carbon Budget 2015

Title: Global Carbon Budget 2015

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO 2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe data sets and a methodology to quantify all major components of the global carbon budget, including their uncertainties, based on the combination of a range of data, algorithms, statistics, and model estimates and their interpretation by a broad scientific community. We also discuss changes compared to previous estimates as well as consistency within and among components, alongside methodology and data limitations. CO 2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry ( E FF) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use change ( E LUC), mainly deforestation, are based on combined evidence from land-cover-change data, fire activity associated with deforestation, and models. The global atmospheric CO 2 concentration is measured directly and its rate of growth ( G ATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. Moreover, the mean ocean CO 2 sink ( S OCEAN) is based on observations from the 1990s, while the annual anomalies and trends are estimated with oceanmore » models. The variability in S OCEAN is evaluated with data products based on surveys of ocean CO 2 measurements. The global residual terrestrial CO 2 sink ( S LAND) is estimated by the difference of the other terms of the global carbon budget and compared to results of independent dynamic global vegetation models forced by observed climate, CO 2, and land-cover change (some including nitrogen–carbon interactions). We compare the mean land and ocean fluxes and their variability to estimates from three atmospheric inverse methods for three broad latitude bands. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ, reflecting the current capacity to characterise the annual estimates of each component of the global carbon budget. For the last decade available (2005–2014), E FF was 9.0 ± 0.5 GtC yr -1, E LUC was 0.9 ± 0.5 GtC yr -1, G ATM was 4.4 ± 0.1 GtC yr -1, S OCEAN was 2.6 ± 0.5 GtC yr -1, and S LAND was 3.0 ± 0.8 GtC yr -1. For the year 2014 alone, E FF grew to 9.8 ± 0.5 GtC yr -1, 0.6 % above 2013, continuing the growth trend in these emissions, albeit at a slower rate compared to the average growth of 2.2 % yr -1 that took place during 2005–2014. Also, for 2014, E LUC was 1.1 ± 0.5 GtC yr -1, G ATM was 3.9 ± 0.2 GtC yr -1, S OCEAN was 2.9 ± 0.5 GtC yr -1, and S LAND was 4.1 ± 0.9 GtC yr -1. G ATM was lower in 2014 compared to the past decade (2005–2014), reflecting a larger S LAND for that year. The global atmospheric CO 2 concentration reached 397.15 ± 0.10 ppm averaged over 2014. For 2015, preliminary data indicate that the growth in E FF will be near or slightly below zero, with a projection of -0.6 [range of -1.6 to +0.5] %, based on national emissions projections for China and the USA, and projections of gross domestic product corrected for recent changes in the carbon intensity of the global economy for the rest of the world. From this projection of E FF and assumed constant E LUC for 2015, cumulative emissions of CO 2 will reach about 555 ± 55 GtC (2035 ± 205 GtCO 2) for 1870–2015, about 75 % from E FF and 25 % from E LUC. Finally, this living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets used in this new carbon budget compared with previous publications of this data set (Le Quéré et al., 2015, 2014, 2013). All observations presented here can be downloaded from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (doi:10.3334/CDIAC/GCP_2015).« less
Authors:
 [1] ; ORCiD logo [1] ; ORCiD logo [2] ;  [3] ;  [4] ;  [2] ;  [4] ;  [2] ;  [5] ;  [5] ;  [6] ;  [7] ;  [8] ;  [9] ;  [10] ;  [1] ;  [11] ;  [12] ;  [12] ;  [12] more »;  [13] ;  [12] ;  [14] ;  [15] ;  [16] ;  [1] ;  [17] ;  [18] ;  [19] ; ORCiD logo [20] ;  [21] ;  [22] ; ORCiD logo [23] ;  [24] ;  [25] ;  [26] ;  [27] ;  [6] ;  [26] ;  [28] ;  [29] ;  [30] ;  [18] ;  [31] ;  [31] ;  [32] ;  [33] ;  [34] ; ORCiD logo [35] ;  [33] ;  [11] ;  [36] ;  [37] ;  [38] ;  [39] ;  [4] ;  [25] ;  [40] ;  [41] ; ORCiD logo [42] ; ORCiD logo [43] ;  [44] ;  [45] ;  [46] ;  [47] ;  [48] ;  [49] ; ORCiD logo [12] ;  [50] ; ORCiD logo [38] ;  [13] « less
+ Show Author Affiliations
  1. Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich (United Kingdom)
  2. CICERO, Oslo (Norway)
  3. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Canberra (Australia)
  4. Univ. of Exeter (United Kingdom)
  5. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  6. Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, MA (United States)
  7. Univ. of Bristol (United Kingdom)
  8. Univ. of California, San Diego, CA (United States)
  9. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO (United States)
  10. Karlsruhe Inst. of Technology (KIT) (Germany)
  11. Univ. of Miami, FL (United States); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab., Boulder, CO (United States)
  12. CEA-CNRS-UVSQ (France)
  13. Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
  14. Aix-Marseille Univ., and CNRS/IN2P3, Marseille (France)
  15. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Pacific Marine Environmental Lab (PMEL), Seattle, WA (United States)
  16. InnovOcean site, Ostend (Belgium)
  17. Alfred Wegener Inst. for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhave (Germany)
  18. Max Planck Inst. for Meteorology, Hamburg (Germany)
  19. Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, IL (United States)
  20. Inst. of Applied Energy (IAE), Tokyo (Japan)
  21. Plymouth Marine Lab. (United Kingdom)
  22. Hague/ Bilthoven and Utrecht Univ. (Netherlands)
  23. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  24. Univ. of Zurich (Switzerland)
  25. Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen (Norway)
  26. Sorbonne Univ., Paris (France)
  27. CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Tasmania (Australia)
  28. Univ. of Miami, FL (United States)
  29. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)
  30. Japan Agency for Marine-Eart Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Yokosuka (Japan)
  31. National Inst. for Environmental Studies (NIES), Ibaraki (Japan)
  32. Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States)
  33. Univ. of Bergen (Norway); Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen (Norway)
  34. Fisheries Research Agency, Yokohama (Japan)
  35. Marine Research Inst. (CSIC), Pontevedra (Spain)
  36. Montana State Univ., Bozeman, MT (United States)
  37. Leibniz Inst. for Baltic Sea Research Warnemunde, Rostock (Germany)
  38. Max Planck Society, Jena (Germany). Max Planck Inst. for Biogeochemistry
  39. Japan Meteorological Agency, Tokyo (Japan)
  40. National Centre for Meteorological Research (CNRM)
  41. GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel (Germany)
  42. Univ. of Bern (Switzerland); Imperial College, Berkshire (United Kingdom)
  43. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Pacific Marine Environmental Lab (PMEL), Seattle, WA (United States); Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States)
  44. Columbia Univ., Palisades, NY (United States). Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
  45. CSIRO Oceans and Atmospher and Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Center, Hobart (Australia)
  46. Wageningen Univ. (Netherlands); ICOS-Carbon Portal, Wageningen (Netherlands)
  47. VU Univ. Amsterdam (Netherlands)
  48. Royal Netherlands Inst. for Sea Research, Texel (Netherlands)
  49. Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham, NH (United States)
  50. Met Office Hadley Center, Exeter (United Kingdom)
Publication Date:
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725; AC02-05CH11231
Type:
Accepted Manuscript
Journal Name:
Earth System Science Data (Online)
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Name: Earth System Science Data (Online); Journal Volume: 7; Journal Issue: 2; Journal ID: ISSN 1866-3516
Publisher:
Copernicus
Research Org:
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Org:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
OSTI Identifier:
1265897
Alternate Identifier(s):
OSTI ID: 1378688
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