A few extreme events dominate global interannual variability in gross primary production

By Jakob Zscheischler, Miguel D. Mahecha, Jannis von Buttlar, Stefan Harmeling, Martin Jung, Anja Rammig, J. Randerson, Bernhard Schölkopf, Sonia I. Seneviratne, E. Tomelleri and 2 more. 2014

261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the impacts of climate extremes on the carbon cycle is important for quantifying the carbon-cycle climate feedback and highly relevant to climate change assessments. Climate extremes and fires can have severe regional effects, but a spatially explicit global impact assessment is still lacking. Here, we directly quantify spatiotemporal contiguous extreme anomalies in four global data sets of gross primary production (GPP) over the last 30 years. We find that positive and negative GPP extremes occurring on 7% of the spatiotemporal domain explain 78% of the global interannual variation in GPP and a significant fraction of variation in the net carbon flux. The largest thousand negative GPP extremes during 1982–2011 (4.3% of the data) account for a decrease in photosynthetic carbon uptake of about 3.5 Pg C yr−1, with most events being attributable to water scarcity. The results imply that it is essential to understand the nature and causes of extremes to understand current and future GPP variability.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62be6f5efedd659cf0f28c121728cb54864784af

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In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Climate-driven risks to the climate mitigation potential of forests (2020, background): “Thesedisturbance events can matter for local- to regional-scale carbon cycling in some areas but are thought to have relativelyminor-to-modest global effects (25, 53).”
The dominant role of semi-arid ecosystems in the trend and variability of the land CO2 sink (2015, methodology): “To account for combined effects of these drivers we adopt 149 an analysis of GPP variations from an “impact perspective” (22-24): we first identify GPP 150 anomalies and then extract their climatic covariates.”
Coupling between the terrestrial carbon and water cycles—a review (2019, background): “Therefore, not just the mean but also the (subseasonal and interannual) variability of soil moisture and its extremes are critical for carbon uptake (Zscheischler et al 2014).”
Effects of climate extremes on the terrestrial carbon cycle: concepts, processes and potential future impacts (2015, background): “They presented four major findings: (1) the total effect of negative carbon cycle GPP extremes is of a similar magnitude as the mean terrestrial carbon sink, (2) the spatial distribution of extremes is highly uneven with ‘hotspot’ regions in many semiarid monsoon-affected regions, (3) the distributi”