Identification

Title

Response of the Amazon carbon balance to the 2010 drought derived with CarbonTracker South America

Abstract

Two major droughts in the past decade had large impacts on carbon exchange in the Amazon. Recent analysis of vertical profile measurements of atmospheric CO₂ and CO by Gatti et al. (2014) suggests that the 2010 drought turned the normally close-to-neutral annual Amazon carbon balance into a substantial source of nearly 0.5 PgC/yr, revealing a strong drought response. In this study, we revisit this hypothesis and interpret not only the same CO₂/CO vertical profile measurements but also additional constraints on carbon exchange such as satellite observations of CO, burned area, and fire hot spots. The results from our CarbonTracker South America data assimilation system suggest that carbon uptake by vegetation was indeed reduced in 2010 but that the magnitude of the decrease strongly depends on the estimated 2010 and 2011 biomass burning emissions. We have used fire products based on burned area (Global Fire Emissions Database version 4), satellite-observed CO columns (Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer), fire radiative power (Global Fire Assimilation System version 1), and fire hot spots (Fire Inventory from NCAR version 1), and found an increase in biomass burning emissions in 2010 compared to 2011 of 0.16 to 0.24 PgC/yr. We derived a decrease of biospheric uptake ranging from 0.08 to 0.26 PgC/yr, with the range determined from a set of alternative inversions using different biomass burning estimates. Our numerical analysis of the 2010 Amazon drought results in a total reduction of carbon uptake of 0.24 to 0.50 PgC/yr and turns the balance from carbon sink to source. Our findings support the suggestion that the hydrological cycle will be an important driver of future changes in Amazonian carbon exchange.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7jd4z0b

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2015-07-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact