Congo Basin Rainforest Is a Net Carbon Source During the Dry Season

Creators: Jiang, Xun¹; Albright, Ronald¹; Creecy, Ellen¹; Li, King‐Fai²; Liang, Mao‐Chang³; Newman, Sally; Wang, Xinyue¹; Karandana Gamalathge, Thishan Dharshana¹; Yung, Yuk L.^{4, 5}

1. University of Houston
2. University of California, Riverside
3. Academia Sinica
4. California Institute of Technology
5. Jet Propulsion Lab

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Abstract

The Congo basin, with an area of about 3.7 million km² in the tropical region, contains the second largest rainforest and is considered as a carbon sink for the atmosphere. Here, using Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite observations, we show that the atmospheric CO₂ over the Congo basin is ∼2 ppm higher than the regional background during June–August, which is primarily due to biomass burning and significantly reduced photosynthetic activities during the dry season. The contribution from the biomass burning is larger than that from the biosphere during June–August. Current budget estimations suggest emissions from biomass burning during the dry season alone account for ∼72% of the Congo basin annual biomass burning emissions and are ∼40% more than the largest terrestrial uptake in the same region during January–March (wet season). Therefore, better seasonal fire management in this region is an important strategy for achieving timely reductions in global carbon emissions as set by international agreements.

Copyright and License

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank referees and the editor for their time and constructive suggestions. X. J. was supported by NASA ROSES 80NSSC19K0198 Program.

Contributions

Conceptualization: Xun Jiang. Formal analysis: Xun Jiang, Ronald Albright. Funding acquisition: Xun Jiang. Investigation: Xun Jiang, Ronald Albright. Methodology: Xun Jiang, Ronald Albright. Supervision: Xun Jiang. Visualization: Xun Jiang, Ronald Albright. Writing – original draft: Xun Jiang, Ronald Albright, King-Fai Li.

Data Availability

OCO-2 data sets of SIF and column CO₂ (version 10) are publicly available at https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov/#mission=OCO-2. The precipitation datasets, which are processed by the GPCP, can be found at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcp.html. The vertical pressure velocity data are from the official website of the NCEP2 Reanalysis (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis2.html). The MODIS burned area data can be downloaded from its official website at http://modis-fire.umd.edu/. In addition, the GFEDv4.1 data are available at https://daac.ornl.gov/VEGETATION/guides/fire_emissions_v4_R1.html. Finally, CarbonTracker CT2019B model outputs are provided by NOAA ESRL and can be downloaded from its official website http://carbontracker.noaa.gov. We used the global datasets in this study and focused our analyses over the Congo basin region.

Supplemental Material

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