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Published August 2024 | Published
Journal Article Open

Enhanced Carbon Flux Response to Atmospheric Aridity and Water Storage Deficit During the 2015–2016 El Niño Compromised Carbon Balance Recovery in Tropical South America

Liu, Junjie1, 2 ORCID icon
Bowman, Kevin1, 3 ORCID icon
Palmer, Paul I.1, 4 ORCID icon
Joiner, Joanna5 ORCID icon
Levine, Paul1 ORCID icon
Bloom, A. Anthony1 ORCID icon
Feng, Liang4
Saatchi, Sassan1 ORCID icon
Keller, Michael1, 6 ORCID icon
Longo, Marcos1, 7 ORCID icon
Schimel, David1 ORCID icon
Wennberg, Paul O.2 ORCID icon
  • 1. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon University of California, Los Angeles
  • 4. ROR icon University of Edinburgh
  • 5. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 6. ROR icon International Institute of Tropical Forestry
  • 7. ROR icon Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Abstract

During the 2015–2016 El Niño, the Amazon basin released almost one gigaton of carbon (GtC) into the atmosphere due to extreme temperatures and drought. The link between the drought impact and recovery of the total carbon pools and its biogeochemical drivers is still unknown. With satellite‐constrained net carbon exchange and its component fluxes including gross primary production and fire emissions, we show that the total carbon loss caused by the 2015–2016 El Niño had not recovered by the end of 2018. Forest ecosystems over the Northeastern (NE) Amazon suffered a cumulative total carbon loss of ∼0.6 GtC through December 2018, driven primarily by a suppression of photosynthesis whereas southeastern savannah carbon loss was driven in part by fire. We attribute the slow recovery to the unexpected large carbon loss caused by the severe atmospheric aridity coupled with a water storage deficit during drought. We show the attenuation of carbon uptake is three times higher than expected from the pre‐drought sensitivity to atmospheric aridity and ground water supply. Our study fills an important knowledge gap in our understanding of the unexpectedly enhanced response of carbon fluxes to atmospheric aridity and water storage deficit and its impact on regional post‐drought recovery as a function of the vegetation types and climate perturbations. Our results suggest that the disproportionate impact of water supply and demand could compromise resiliency of the Amazonian carbon balance to future increases in extreme events.

Copyright and License

© 2024. The Author(s).

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science (JL, KB, SS, MK, PL, AAB), National Aeronautics and Space Administration Orbiting Carbon Observatory Science Team program and Carbon Cycle Science program (JL), National Aeronautics and Space Administration postdoc program (ML), Department of Energy Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics fund (ML), National Centre for Earth Observation funded by the National Environment Research Council (NE/R016518/1) (PIP and LF). Part of the research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, (80NM0018D0004).

Contributions

Conceptualization: Junjie Liu.

Data curation: Junjie Liu, Paul I. Palmer, Joanna Joiner, Paul Levine, A. Anthony Bloom, Liang Feng.

Formal analysis: Junjie Liu.

Funding acquisition: Junjie Liu, Kevin Bowman, Paul I. Palmer.

Investigation: Junjie Liu, Kevin Bowman, Paul I. Palmer, Joanna Joiner, Paul Levine, A. Anthony Bloom, Sassan Saatchi, Michael Keller, Marcos Longo, David Schimel, Paul O. Wennberg.

Data Availability

Data Availability Statement:

(1)

CMS-Flux NBE 2020 is available at: https://cmsflux.jpl.nasa.gov/get-data/nbe-2020/ (Liu et al., 2020).

(2)

GEOS-Chem-EnKF NBE is available at: https://www.nceo.ac.uk/data-tools/atmospheric-tools/.

(3)

FluxSAT GPP is available at: https://gs614-avdc1-pz.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/tmp/FluxSat_GPP/.

(4)

MODIS NIRv is available at https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dataprod/.

(5)

OCO-2 SIF B10 is available at: https://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets/OCO2_L2_Lite_SIF_10r/summary?keywords=OCO2%20L2%20SIF%20lite (Kiel et al., 2019).

(6)

ERA5 VPD is available at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-land-monthly-means?tab=overview (Muñoz Sabater, J., 2019).

(7)

GRACE TWS is available at: https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/data/get-data/.

(8)

GLEAM evapotranspiration and transpiration is available at https://www.gleam.eu/.

(9)

Nino 3.4 index is available at: https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/nino-sst-indices-nino-12-3-34-4-oni-and-tni (Schneider et al., 2013).

(10)

LBA-ECO CD-32 Flux Tower Network Data Compilation is available at https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1174 (Saleska et al., 2013).

Supplemental Material

Supporting Information S1 (PDF)

Original Version of Manuscript (PDF)

Peer Review History (PDF)

Author Response to Peer Review Comments (PDF)

First Revision of Manuscript (PDF)

Second Revision of Manuscript (PDF)

Third Revision of Manuscript [Accepted] (PDF)

Files

AGU Advances - 2024 - Liu - Enhanced Carbon Flux Response to Atmospheric Aridity and Water Storage Deficit During the 2015.pdf

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