CaltechAUTHORS
Published December 23, 2021 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Extreme events driving year-to-year differences in gross primary productivity across the US

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of Washington
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 3. ROR icon University of California, Davis
  • 4. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 5. ROR icon University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) has previously been shown to strongly correlate with gross primary productivity (GPP); however this relationship has not yet been quantified for the recently launched TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI). Here we use a Gaussian mixture model to develop a parsimonious relationship between SIF from TROPOMI and GPP from flux towers across the conterminous United States (CONUS). The mixture model indicates the SIF–GPP relationship can be characterized by a linear model with two terms. We then estimate GPP across CONUS at 500 m spatial resolution over a 16 d moving window. We observe four extreme precipitation events that induce regional GPP anomalies: drought in western Texas, flooding in the midwestern US, drought in South Dakota, and drought in California. Taken together, these events account for 28 % of the year-to-year GPP differences across CONUS. Despite these large regional anomalies, we find that CONUS GPP varies by less than 4 % between 2018 and 2019.

Copyright and License

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the team that has realized the TROPOMI instrument, consisting of the partnership between Airbus Defence and Space, KNMI, SRON, and TNO, commissioned by NSO and ESA. We acknowledge the following AmeriFlux sites for their data records: US-ALQ, US-ARM, US-Bi1, US-Bi2, US-CF1, US-CF2, US-CF3, US-CF4, US-CS1, US-CS2, US-CS3, US-EDN, US-GLE, US-Hn2, US-Hn3, US-Ho1, US-JRn, US-Jo2, US-KS3, US-Los, US-Me2, US-Me6, US-Men, US-Mpj, US-MtB, US-Myb, US-NC2, US-NC3, US-NC4, US-Rls, US-Rms, US-Ro4, US-Ro5, US-Ro6, US-Rwf, US-Rws, US-SRG, US-SRM, US-Seg, US-Ses, US-Sne, US-Snf, US-Syv, US-Ton, US-Tw1, US-Tw4, US-Tw5, US-UMd, US-Var, US-Vcm, US-Vcp, US-WCr, US-Whs, US-Wjs, US-Wkg, US-xAB, US-xBR, US-xCP, US-xDC, US-xDL, US-xHA, US-xJE, US-xJR, US-xKA, US-xKZ, US-xNG, US-xNQ, US-xRM, US-xSE, US-xSL, US-xSP, US-xSR, US-xST, US-xTE, US-xUK, US-xUN, US-xWD, US-xWR, and US-xYE. In addition, funding for AmeriFlux data resources was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Funding

Alexander J. Turner was supported by the NASA Carbon Cycle Science program (grant no. 80HQTR21T0101), the NASA Early Career Faculty program (grant 80NSSC21K1808), and as a Miller Fellow with the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. This research was funded by grants from the Koret Foundation and NASA (no. 80NSSC19K0945) for support of the computational resources. Part of this research was funded by the NASA Carbon Cycle Science program (grant no. NNX17AE14G). TROPOMI SIF data generation by Philipp Köhler and Christian Frankenberg is funded by the Earth Science U.S. Participating Investigator program (grant no. NNX15AH95G). Troy S. Magney was supported through the Macrosystems Biology and NEON-Enabled Science program (grant no. DEB-579 1926090). This research used the Savio computational cluster resource provided by the Berkeley Research Computing program at the University of California, Berkeley (supported by the UC Berkeley Chancellor, Vice Chancellor for Research, and Chief Information Officer).

Contributions

AJT wrote the text with feedback from all authors. PK and CF performed the TROPOMI SIF retrievals. AJT downscaled the SIF data, conducted the AmeriFlux analysis, and drafted the figures. All authors contributed to the discussion and analysis.

Data Availability

Daily gridded 500 m TROPOMI SIF and GPP data from 1 February 2018 through 15 June 2020 are temporarily available on Google Drive at https://bit.ly/2GHEOOq and has been uploaded to the ORNL DAAC https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1875 (Turner et al., 2021b).

Supplemental Material

The supplement related to this article is available online at: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-6579-2021-supplement.

Additional Information

This paper was edited by Paul Stoy and reviewed by two anonymous referees.

Files

bg-18-6579-2021.pdf

Files (105.9 MB)

Name Size Download all
md5:5639384a721be436c1ca9757497b6c67
97.0 MB Preview Download
md5:93cba389aacbf51523486f66c2feace1
8.9 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2021-49/bg-2021-49.pdf (URL)
Is supplemented by
Supplemental Material: 10.5194/bg-18-6579-2021-supplement (DOI)
Dataset: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1875 (DOI)

Funding

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80HQTR21T0101
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80NSSC21K1808
Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science
Koret Foundation
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80NSSC19K0945
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NNX17AE14G
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NNX15AH95G
National Science Foundation
DEB-579 1926090

Dates

Accepted
2021-11-18

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS)
Publication Status
Published