Articles | Volume 26, issue 8
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-2045-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-2045-2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Research article
| 
27 Apr 2022
Research article |
| 27 Apr 2022
| 27 Apr 2022
Investigating the response of leaf area index to droughts in southern African vegetation using observations and model simulations
Climate System Analysis Group, Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town, Cape Town 7700, South Africa
Stephen Sitch
College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QE, UK
Danica Lombardozzi
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Climate and Global Dynamics, Terrestrial Sciences Section, Boulder, CO 80305, USA
Julia E. M. S. Nabel
Land in Earth System (LES), Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
Hao-Wei Wey
Land in Earth System (LES), Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
Pierre Friedlingstein
College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QF, UK
Hanqin Tian
School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, Auburn University, 602 Duncan Drive, Auburn, AL 36849, USA
Bruce Hewitson
Climate System Analysis Group, Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town, Cape Town 7700, South Africa
Related authors
No articles found.
Vivek K. Arora, Chris D. Jones, Pierre Friedlingstein, Tatiana Ilyina, Guilherme L. Torres Mendonça, Benjamin Sanderson, Charles Koven, Heather Graven, Michio Kawamiya, Victor Brovkin, John Dunne, Forrest M. Hoffman, Julia Pongratz, James T. Randerson, Anastasia Romanou, Sönke Zaehle, and Kirsten Zickfeld
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-5533, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-5533, 2026
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Geoscientific Model Development (GMD).
Short summary
Short summary
Earth system models (ESM) are important tools for understanding how the Earth’s climate and carbon cycle interact, and how Earth system responds to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The Coupled Climate-Carbon Cycle Model Intercomparison Project (C4MIP) compares Earth system models from around the world in context of climate and carbon cycle interactions. This manuscript describes the new set of experiments for C4MIP for the seventh phase of the coupled modelling intercomparison project (CMIP7).
Marina Friedel, Marlene Kretschmer, and Bruce Hewitson
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-5970, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-5970, 2026
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Weather and Climate Dynamics (WCD).
Short summary
Short summary
Climate models agree that winter rainfall in South Africa's Southwestern Cape will decline, but disagree on the magnitude of this drying. We show that changes in large-scale circulation explain most of the rainfall changes, as well as a large part of year-to-year rainfall variability, and account for around one third of the disagreement between models. However, models underestimate the links between circulation and rainfall and therefore may also underestimate future precipitation changes.
Wensu Hao, Hanqin Tian, Hao Shi, Xing Yu, Naiqing Pan, Shufen Pan, Francesco N. Tubiello, Wulahati Adalibieke, Martial Bernoux, Philippe Ciais, Federico Maggi, Kazuya Nishina, Aimable Uwizeye, and Feng Zhou
Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-595, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2026-595, 2026
Preprint under review for ESSD
Short summary
Short summary
HaNi-Crop dataset presents a long-term global dataset of nitrogen inputs from synthetic fertilizers and animal manure for different crops from 1961 to 2023. Built by combining agricultural statistics with crop distribution information, the dataset reveals how nutrient use has changed over time and provides a valuable resource for improving food production, environmental protection, climate change, and more sustainable agricultural management.
Jens Terhaar, Laurent Bopp, Pierre Friedlingstein, Thomas Frölicher, Helene Hollitzer, Tatiana Ilyina, Lester Kwiatkowski, Paul Lerner, Hongmei Li, Anastasia Romanou, Jörg Schwinger, Roland Séférian, and Aaron Wienkers
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-5757, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-5757, 2026
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Biogeosciences (BG).
Short summary
Short summary
The ocean absorbs about 30% of CO2 emissions, but how much it will keep absorbing as CO2 levels rise and the climate warms is highly uncertain. Combining climate models with observations, we show models underestimate both the ocean CO2 uptake with increasing atmospheric CO2 and how strongly this uptake weakens with warming, and that the two are linked. Our tighter estimate reduces uncertainty in how much emitted CO2 stays in the atmosphere, and in the warming caused by future emissions.
Zihao Bian, Hao Shi, Rui Li, Fei Lun, Francesco N. Tubiello, Nathaniel D. Mueller, Shiyu You, Rong Hao, Jiageng Ma, Longhui Li, Changchun Huang, Bing He, Yuanzhi Yao, and Hanqin Tian
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 7125–7141, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-7125-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-7125-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
The History of Anthropogenic Phosphorus Inputs (HaPi) provides a dataset of global human-driven phosphorus fluxes to terrestrial biosphere from 1860–2020 at a resolution of 5 arcmin. This comprehensive dataset consists of phosphorus fertilizer/manure application to cropland, manure application/deposition to pasture, manure deposition to rangeland, and atmospheric phosphorus deposition. It supports analyses of nutrient budgets and provides essential forcing data for Earth system models.
Tea Thum, Christine L. Goodale, Lin Yu, Julia Nabel, and Sönke Zaehle
Biogeosciences, 23, 6249–6266, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-23-6249-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-23-6249-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
Nitrogen and carbon cycle have manifold interactions and to be able predict carbon sequestration of terrestrial vegetation, ability to model nitrogen cycle properly is important. 15N tracer experiments can be helpful, as they track the fate where added nitrogen will end up in the ecosystem. We simulated one such experiment with a model containing 15N cycle and found that comparison with data helped to evaluate the model in different aspects.
Leo T. H. Ng, Jia Mao, Xueying Liu, Shixian Zhai, Dominic Fawcett, Stephen Sitch, Luiz E. O. C. Aragao, and Amos P. K. Tai
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 26, 11835–11855, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-26-11835-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-26-11835-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
Wildfires in the Amazon worsen air pollution and threaten public health, yet the role of droughts in amplifying these effects is poorly understood. Using satellite data and atmospheric modeling, we assessed how droughts intensified fire emissions and pollution in the Brazilian Amazon from 2010–2015. During drought years, fires contributed up to 76 % of harmful particles and raised premature deaths by up to 24 %. These results stress the need for fire management that accounts for drought risks.
Chris Huntingford, Rebecca J. Oliver, Lina M. Mercado, Stephen A. Sitch, Douglas B. Clark, Annikki Mäkelä, Carolina Mayoral, and Richard J. Norby
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4392, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4392, 2026
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Biogeosciences (BG).
Short summary
Short summary
Understanding carbon allocation among land-surface components in a changing climate is important, but it remains poorly understood. As a surrogate for missing knowledge and related equations, optimal allocation hypotheses are proposed. Makela et al. (2008) propose foliage nitrogen adjusted to maximise gross primary productivity. We add to that framework models of photosynthesis and respiration, creating an optimal structure that responds to different near-surface meteorological conditions.
Zijun Wang, Rong Wu, Yangyang Liu, Zhaoying Zhang, Zhongming Wen, Zhenqian Wang, Stephen Sitch, and Wenping Yuan
Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 30, 4985–5004, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-4985-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-30-4985-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
The coupling between water use efficiency (WUE) and drought remains unclear. This study first incorporates the optimal drought timescale at which WUE responds to drought. The results show that optimal drought timescale has gradually lengthened, indicating a weakening WUE-drought coupling, mainly driven by CO₂ fertilization, with surface soil moisture as the most important hydrothermal factor. This study provides new insights into assessing WUE responses to drought.
Ida Bagus Mandhara Brasika, Pierre Friedlingstein, Stephen Sitch, Michael O'Sullivan, Maria Carolina Duran-Rojas, Emma W. Littleton, Toby R. Marthews, Timothy Hill, Wei Li, Yidi Xu, Jiaxin Zhou, Xiangzhong Luo, Ruiying Zhao, Yuanchao Fan, Dedy Sukmara, Timer Manurung, Masayuki Kondo, Alexander Knohl, Tejaswini Jaajpera, and Lisma Safitri
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3689, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3689, 2026
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Geoscientific Model Development (GMD).
Short summary
Short summary
Oil palm is a major crop in Indonesia, but climate models often treat it as generic cropland. We developed a new way to represent oil palm in the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator. This improved how the model captures carbon stored and released by oil-palm plantations. The work helps estimate emissions from land-use change more realistically, supporting better understanding of tropical agriculture, deforestation and climate impacts.
Tim Stripp, Zhixuan Guo, Pierre Friedlingstein, Michael O’Sullivan, Stephen Sitch, Ana Bastos, Philippe Ciais, Jefferson Goncalves de Souza, Akihiko Ito, Wei Li, and Lei Ma
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3584, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-3584, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
Fire is a key process within the Earth system, yet it is often poorly represented in land carbon cycle models used to estimate how much carbon land ecosystems absorb from the atmosphere. We improved these models by applying long-term burned area data reconstructed from satellite observations. This reduced biases and uncertainty in fire carbon emission estimates and improved estimates of land carbon uptake, implying this method could enhance global and regional carbon budget estimates.
Piers M. Forster, Tristram Walsh, Chris Smith, William F. Lamb, Robin Lamboll, Christophe Cassou, Mathias Hauser, Zeke Hausfather, June-Yi Lee, Matthew D. Palmer, Karina von Schuckmann, Aimée B. A. Slangen, Sophie Szopa, Blair Trewin, Jeongeun Yun, Nathan P. Gillett, Stuart Jenkins, H. Damon Matthews, Krishnan Raghavan, Aurélien Ribes, Joeri Rogelj, Debbie Rosen, Xuebin Zhang, Myles Allen, Robbie M. Andrew, Chris Atkinson, Richard A. Betts, Antonio Bombelli, Samantha N. Burgess, Lijing Cheng, Helen E. Claxton, Pierre Friedlingstein, Thomas L. Frölicher, Catia M. Domingues, Thomas Gasser, Catherine H. Gregory, Rachel M. Hoesly, Daniel Huppmann, Masayoshi Ishii, Christopher Kadow, Alexia Karwat, John Kennedy, Rachel E. Killick, Mahesh V. M. Kovilakam, Paul B. Krummel, Xin Lan, Jean-François Lamarque, Aurélien Liné, Belén Martín-Míguez, Didier P. Monselesan, Colin Morice, Jens Mühle, Pino Mussak, Glen P. Peters, Anna Pirani, Julia Pongratz, Matthew Rigby, Robert Rohde, Abhishek Savita, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Steven J. Smith, Ghassan Taha, Caterina Tassone, Peter Thorne, Christopher Wells, Luke M. Western, Guido R. van der Werf, Susan E. Wijffels, Marco Zecchetto, Junting Zhong, Xiao-Ye Zhang, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, and Panmao Zhai
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 3889–3933, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3889-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3889-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
We give our annual update of key climate indicators. Our work quantifies the human contribution to global warming and the pace of climate change. This represents a large effort by the international community akin to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
Marina Lévy, Karina von Schuckmann, Mahé Butel, William W. L. Cheung, Joachim Claudet, Thomas L. Frölicher, Patrice Guillotreau, Peter Haugan, Janine Adams, Diva Amon, Tamatoa Bambridge, Cynthia Barzuna, Bruno Blanke, Lijing Cheng, Sanae Chiba, Jorge Cortés, Pierre Friedlingstein, Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Stefan Gelcich, Jessica Gephart, Deborah Greaves, Audrey Hasson, Claire Jolly, Daoji Li, Yunne-Jai Shin, Aimée Slangen, Mere Takoko, Olivier Thébaud, Adrien Vincent, and Patrick Vincent
State Planet, 7-osr10, 1, https://doi.org/10.5194/sp-7-osr10-1-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/sp-7-osr10-1-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
The Starfish Barometer provides an annual, science-based synthesis of global Ocean-related developments, structured around five interconnected dimensions: the Ocean state, human pressures, societal harms, protection efforts, and opportunities for humanity. It is released each year on World Ocean Day. This article presents the second edition of the Barometer, which shows a growing gap between increasing human pressures on the Ocean and the efforts being made to protect it and drive change.
Mengze Li, Robert B. Jackson, Marielle Saunois, Philippe Ciais, Ben Poulter, Josep G. Canadell, Prabir K. Patra, Hanqin Tian, Zhen Zhang, Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, Zutao Ouyang, Ting Zhang, David J. Beerling, Dmitry A. Belikov, Philippe Bousquet, Danilo Custodio, Naveen Chandra, Xinyu Dou, Nicola Gedney, Peter O. Hopcroft, Alison M. Hoyt, Kazuhito Ichii, Akihito Ito, Atul K. Jain, Katherine Jensen, Fortunat Joos, Thomas Kleinen, Masayuki Kondo, Fa Li, Tingting Li, Xiangyu Liu, Shamil Maksyutov, Avni Malhotra, Adrien Martinez, Kyle McDonald, Joe R. Melton, Jurek Müller, Yosuke Niwa, Shufen Pan, Shushi Peng, Changhui Peng, Zhangcai Qin, Peter Raymond, William Riley, Arjo Segers, Rona L. Thompson, Aki Tsuruta, Yi Xi, Kunxiaojia Yuan, Wenxin Zhang, Bo Zheng, Qing Zhu, Qiuan Zhu, and Qianlai Zhuang
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 3507–3524, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3507-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3507-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
We proposed a framework that combines machine-learning and climate data to predict global natural vegetated wetland methane emissions for 2000–2025. We found that although total global emissions remained stable in the post-2020s, Northern Hemisphere emissions surged whilst tropical emissions fell. This approach allows us to rapidly monitor emissions and provides early warnings for climate impacts.
Elizabeth Quaye, Ben T. Johnson, James M. Haywood, Guido R. van der Werf, Roland Vernooij, Stephen A. Sitch, and Tom Eames
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 26, 6629–6654, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-26-6629-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-26-6629-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
We find aerosol optical depths in a global climate model are overestimated during extreme wildfire events if emissions are scaled up by a factor of two, typically applied to improve simulated aerosol on seasonal–annual timescales. We propose a technique where a variable scaling factor is determined by fuel consumption, improving correlation in five fire-affected areas. We explore the impact of this change on aerosol radiative effects, during extreme events and on broader space and time scales.
Pierre Friedlingstein, Michael O'Sullivan, Matthew W. Jones, Robbie M. Andrew, Dorothee C. E. Bakker, Judith Hauck, Peter Landschützer, Corinne Le Quéré, Hongmei Li, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Glen P. Peters, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Kjetil Aas, Simone R. Alin, Peter Anthoni, Leticia Barbero, Nicholas R. Bates, Nicolas Bellouin, Alice Benoit-Cattin, Carla F. Berghoff, Raffaele Bernardello, Laurent Bopp, Ida Bagus Mandhara Brasika, Matthew A. Chamberlain, Naveen Chandra, Frédéric Chevallier, Louise P. Chini, Nathan O. Collier, Thomas H. Colligan, Margot Cronin, Laique M. Djeutchouang, Xinyu Dou, Matt P. Enright, Kazutaka Enyo, Michael Erb, Wiley Evans, Richard A. Feely, Liang Feng, Daniel J. Ford, Adrianna Foster, Filippa Fransner, Thomas Gasser, Marion Gehlen, Thanos Gkritzalis, Jefferson Goncalves De Souza, Giacomo Grassi, Luke Gregor, Nicolas Gruber, Bertrand Guenet, Özgür Gürses, Kirsty Harrington, Ian Harris, Jens Heinke, George C. Hurtt, Yosuke Iida, Tatiana Ilyina, Akihiko Ito, Andrew R. Jacobson, Atul K. Jain, Tereza Jarníková, Annika Jersild, Fei Jiang, Steve D. Jones, Etsushi Kato, Ralph F. Keeling, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jürgen Knauer, Yawen Kong, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Charles Koven, Taro Kunimitsu, Xin Lan, Junjie Liu, Zhiqiang Liu, Zhu Liu, Claire Lo Monaco, Lei Ma, Gregg Marland, Patrick C. McGuire, Galen A. McKinley, Joe R. Melton, Natalie Monacci, Erwan Monier, Eric J. Morgan, David R. Munro, Jens D. Müller, Shin-Ichiro Nakaoka, Lorna R. Nayagam, Yosuke Niwa, Tobias Nutzel, Are Olsen, Abdirahman M. Omar, Naiqing Pan, Sudhanshu Pandey, Denis Pierrot, Zhangcai Qin, Pierre Regnier, Gregor Rehder, Laure Resplandy, Alizée Roobaert, Thais M. Rosan, Christian Rödenbeck, Jörg Schwinger, Ingunn Skjelvan, T. Luke Smallman, Victoria Spada, Mohanan G. Sreeush, Qing Sun, Adrienne J. Sutton, Colm Sweeney, Didier Swingedouw, Roland Séférian, Shintaro Takao, Hiroaki Tatebe, Hanqin Tian, Xiangjun Tian, Bronte Tilbrook, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Francesco Tubiello, Erik van Ooijen, Guido R. van der Werf, Sebastiaan J. van de Velde, Anthony P. Walker, Rik Wanninkhof, Xiaojuan Yang, Wenping Yuan, Xu Yue, and Jiye Zeng
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 3211–3288, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3211-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3211-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
The Global Carbon Budget 2025 describes the methodology, main results, and datasets used to quantify the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and their partitioning among the atmosphere, land ecosystems, and the ocean over the historical period (1750–2025). These living datasets are updated every year to provide the highest transparency and traceability in the reporting of CO2, the key driver of climate change.
William F. Lamb, Robbie M. Andrew, Matthew Jones, Zebedee Nicholls, Glen P. Peters, Chris Smith, Marielle Saunois, Giacomo Grassi, Julia Pongratz, Steven J. Smith, Francesco N. Tubiello, Monica Crippa, Matthew Gidden, Pierre Friedlingstein, Jan Minx, and Piers M. Forster
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 18, 2549–2572, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-2549-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-2549-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
This study explores why global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions estimates vary. Key reasons include different coverage of gases and sectors, varying definitions of anthropogenic land use change emissions, and the Paris Agreement not covering all emission sources. The study highlights three main ways emissions data is reported, each with different objectives and resulting in varying global emission totals. It emphasizes the need for transparency in choosing datasets and setting assessment scopes.
Detlef P. Van Vuuren, Brian C. O'Neill, Claudia Tebaldi, Benjamin M. Sanderson, Louise P. Chini, Pierre Friedlingstein, Tomoko Hasegawa, Keywan Riahi, Bala Govindasamy, Nico Bauer, Veronika Eyring, Cheikh M. N. Fall, Katja Frieler, Matthew J. Gidden, Laila K. Gohar, Annika Högner, Andrew D. Jones, Jarmo Kikstra, Andrew King, Reto Knutti, Elmar Kriegler, Peter Lawrence, Chris Lennard, Jason Lowe, Camilla Mathison, Shahbaz Mehmood, Zebedee Nicholls, Luciana F. Prado, Qiang Zhang, Steven K. Rose, Alex C. Ruane, Marit Sandstad, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Roland Seferian, Jana Sillmann, Chris Smith, Anna A. Sörensson, Swapna Panickal, Kaoru Tachiiri, Naomi Vaughan, Saritha S. Vishwanathan, Tokuta Yokohata, Marco Zecchetto, and Tilo Ziehn
Geosci. Model Dev., 19, 2627–2656, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-2627-2026, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-2627-2026, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
We propose a set of seven plausible 21st century emission scenarios, and their multi-century extensions, that will be used by the international community of climate modeling centers to produce the next generation of climate projections. These projections will support climate, impact and mitigation researchers, provide information to practitioners to address future risks from climate change, and contribute to policymakers’ considerations of the trade-offs among various levels of mitigation.
Joana Melo, Simone Rossi, Frédéric Achard, Ramdane Alkama, Josep G. Canadell, Sandro Federici, Pierre Friedlingstein, David Gibbs, Nancy Harris, Viola Heinrich, Michael O’Sullivan, Glen P. Peters, Julia Pongratz, Melissa Rose, Rosa Roman-Cuesta, María J. Sanz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Stephen Sitch, and Giacomo Grassi
Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2025-631, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2025-631, 2026
Preprint under review for ESSD
Short summary
Short summary
We created the LULUCF Data Hub to make information on how land use affects carbon dioxide emissions and removals more transparent and comparable among datasets. We show country-level data from national reports and global sources, allowing users to explore differences and similarities in land-based carbon fluxes. It helps identify where data agree, where they differ, and where more research is needed.
Jean-Francois Lamarque, Pierre Friedlingstein, Brian Osias, Steve Strongin, Venkatramani Balaji, Kevin W. Bowman, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Heidi Cullen, Kenneth J. Davis, Scott C. Doney, Kevin R. Gurney, Alicia R. Karspeck, Charles D. Koven, Galen McKinley, Glen P. Peters, Julia Pongratz, Britt Stephens, and Colm Sweeney
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-6457, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-6457, 2026
Short summary
Short summary
This Perspective highlights requirements to scale the carbon credit market and enable the growth in climate solutions funded through such market. The requirements are on the understanding of the value of the proposed carbon credit projects, and on the availability of a verification system. This verification becomes particularly relevant as the carbon credit market scales to significant impacts on CO2 (or other greenhouse gases), such that attribution to collective actions can be identified.
Hemraj Bhattarai, Maria Val Martin, Stephen Sitch, David H. Y. Yung, and Amos P. K. Tai
Biogeosciences, 22, 7591–7610, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-7591-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-7591-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change, posing various risks. We explore how future climate conditions will influence global wildfire activity and carbon emissions by 2100. Using advanced computer modeling, we found that while some regions remain stable, boreal forests will see a major rise in burned area and emissions. These changes are driven by drier conditions and increased vegetation growth, highlighting the urgent need for better fire management strategies.
Cheng Gong, Yan Wang, Hanqin Tian, Sian Kou-Giesbrecht, Nicolas Vuichard, and Sönke Zaehle
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 25, 17009–17025, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-17009-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-17009-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Our results showed substantially varied fertilizer-induced soil NOx emissions in 2019 from 0.84 to 2.2 Tg N yr-1 globally. Such variations further lead to 0.1 to 3.3 ppbv summertime ozone enhancement in agricultural hotspot regions and 6.7 ppbv to 16.6 ppbv reductions in global methane concentrations.
Binyuan Xu, Hanqin Tian, Shufen Pan, Xiaoyong Li, Ran Meng, Óscar Melo, Anne McDonald, María de los Ángeles Picone, Xiao-Peng Song, Edson Severnini, Katharine G. Young, and Feng Zhao
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 6353–6377, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-6353-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-6353-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
This study reconstructed the spatial and temporal patterns of four major crops (soybean, maize, wheat, and rice) in South America from 1950 to 2020 by integrating multiple data sources. The results reveal a significant expansion in cropland, particularly for soybean, leading to a substantial reduction in natural vegetation such as forests and grasslands. The datasets can be used to assess the impacts of cropland expansion on water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles in South America.
Daniele Peano, Deborah Hemming, Christine Delire, Yuanchao Fan, Hanna Lee, Stefano Materia, Julia E. M. S. Nabel, Taejin Park, David Wårlind, Andy Wiltshire, and Sönke Zaehle
Biogeosciences, 22, 7117–7135, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-7117-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-7117-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Earth System Models are the principal tools for scientists to study past, present, and future climate changes. This work investigates the ability of a set of them to represent the observed changes in vegetation, which are vital to estimating the impact of future climate mitigation and adaptation strategies. This study highlights the main limitations in correctly representing vegetation variability. These tools still need further development to improve our understanding of future changes.
Inês Vieira, Félicien Meunier, Maria Carolina Duran Rojas, Stephen Sitch, Flossie Brown, Giacomo Gerosa, Silvano Fares, Pascal Boeckx, Marijn Bauters, and Hans Verbeeck
Biogeosciences, 22, 6205–6223, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-6205-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-6205-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
We used a computer model to study how ozone pollution reduces plant growth in six European forests, from Finland to Italy. Combining field data and simulations, we found that ozone can lower carbon uptake by up to 6 % each year, especially in Mediterranean areas. Our study shows that local climate and forest type influence ozone damage and highlights the need to include ozone effects in forest and climate models.
Rubaya Pervin, Scott Robeson, Mallory Barnes, Stephen Sitch, Anthony Walker, Ben Poulter, Fabienne Maignan, Qing Sun, Thomas Colligan, Sönke Zaehle, Kashif Mahmud, Peter Anthoni, Almut Arneth, Vivek Arora, Vladislav Bastrikov, Liam Bogucki, Bertrand Decharme, Christine Delire, Stefanie Falk, Akihiko Ito, Etsushi Kato, Daniel Kennedy, Jürgen Knauer, Michael O’Sullivan, Wenping Yuan, and Natasha MacBean
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-2841, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-2841, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Drylands contribute more than a third of the global vegetation productivity. Yet, these regions are not well represented in global vegetation models. Here, we tested how well 15 global models capture annual changes in dryland vegetation productivity. Models that didn’t have vegetation change over time or fire have lower variability in vegetation productivity. Models need better representation of grass cover types and their coverage. Our work highlights where and how these models need to improve.
Zhixuan Guo, Wei Li, Philippe Ciais, Stephen Sitch, Guido R. van der Werf, Simon P. K. Bowring, Ana Bastos, Florent Mouillot, Jiaying He, Minxuan Sun, Lei Zhu, Xiaomeng Du, Nan Wang, and Xiaomeng Huang
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 3599–3618, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-3599-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-3599-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
To address the limitations of short time spans in satellite data and spatiotemporal discontinuity in site records, we reconstructed global monthly burned area maps at a 0.5° resolution for 1901–2020 using machine learning models. The global burned area is predicted at 3.46 × 106–4.58 × 106 km² per year, showing a decline from 1901 to 1978, an increase from 1978 to 2008 and a sharper decrease from 2008 to 2020. This dataset provides a benchmark for studies on fire ecology and the carbon cycle.
Ida Bagus Mandhara Brasika, Pierre Friedlingstein, Stephen Sitch, Michael O'Sullivan, Maria Carolina Duran-Rojas, Thais Michele Rosan, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Julia Pongratz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Louise P. Chini, and George C. Hurtt
Biogeosciences, 22, 3547–3561, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-3547-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-3547-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Indonesia is the world's third-highest carbon emitter from land use change. However, there are uncertainties in the carbon emissions of Indonesia. Our best estimate of carbon emissions from land use change in Indonesia is 0.12 ± 0.02 PgC/yr with a steady trend. Despite many uncertainties created by drivers, models, and products, we also found robust agreements between these models and products. All agree that Indonesian carbon emissions from LULCC (land use and land cover change) have had no decreasing trend for the last 2 decades.
Piers M. Forster, Chris Smith, Tristram Walsh, William F. Lamb, Robin Lamboll, Christophe Cassou, Mathias Hauser, Zeke Hausfather, June-Yi Lee, Matthew D. Palmer, Karina von Schuckmann, Aimée B. A. Slangen, Sophie Szopa, Blair Trewin, Jeongeun Yun, Nathan P. Gillett, Stuart Jenkins, H. Damon Matthews, Krishnan Raghavan, Aurélien Ribes, Joeri Rogelj, Debbie Rosen, Xuebin Zhang, Myles Allen, Lara Aleluia Reis, Robbie M. Andrew, Richard A. Betts, Alex Borger, Jiddu A. Broersma, Samantha N. Burgess, Lijing Cheng, Pierre Friedlingstein, Catia M. Domingues, Marco Gambarini, Thomas Gasser, Johannes Gütschow, Masayoshi Ishii, Christopher Kadow, John Kennedy, Rachel E. Killick, Paul B. Krummel, Aurélien Liné, Didier P. Monselesan, Colin Morice, Jens Mühle, Vaishali Naik, Glen P. Peters, Anna Pirani, Julia Pongratz, Jan C. Minx, Matthew Rigby, Robert Rohde, Abhishek Savita, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Peter Thorne, Christopher Wells, Luke M. Western, Guido R. van der Werf, Susan E. Wijffels, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, and Panmao Zhai
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 2641–2680, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-2641-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-2641-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets to track real-world changes over time. To make our work relevant to policymakers, we follow methods from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Human activities are increasing the Earth's energy imbalance and driving faster sea-level rise compared to the IPCC assessment.
Lingbo Li, Hong-Yi Li, Guta Abeshu, Jinyun Tang, L. Ruby Leung, Chang Liao, Zeli Tan, Hanqin Tian, Peter Thornton, and Xiaojuan Yang
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 2713–2733, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-2713-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-2713-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
We have developed new maps that reveal how organic carbon from soil leaches into headwater streams over the contiguous United States. We use advanced artificial intelligence techniques and a massive amount of data, including observations at over 2500 gauges and a wealth of climate and environmental information. The maps are a critical step in understanding and predicting how carbon moves through our environment, hence making them a useful tool for tackling climate challenges.
Marielle Saunois, Adrien Martinez, Benjamin Poulter, Zhen Zhang, Peter A. Raymond, Pierre Regnier, Josep G. Canadell, Robert B. Jackson, Prabir K. Patra, Philippe Bousquet, Philippe Ciais, Edward J. Dlugokencky, Xin Lan, George H. Allen, David Bastviken, David J. Beerling, Dmitry A. Belikov, Donald R. Blake, Simona Castaldi, Monica Crippa, Bridget R. Deemer, Fraser Dennison, Giuseppe Etiope, Nicola Gedney, Lena Höglund-Isaksson, Meredith A. Holgerson, Peter O. Hopcroft, Gustaf Hugelius, Akihiko Ito, Atul K. Jain, Rajesh Janardanan, Matthew S. Johnson, Thomas Kleinen, Paul B. Krummel, Ronny Lauerwald, Tingting Li, Xiangyu Liu, Kyle C. McDonald, Joe R. Melton, Jens Mühle, Jurek Müller, Fabiola Murguia-Flores, Yosuke Niwa, Sergio Noce, Shufen Pan, Robert J. Parker, Changhui Peng, Michel Ramonet, William J. Riley, Gerard Rocher-Ros, Judith A. Rosentreter, Motoki Sasakawa, Arjo Segers, Steven J. Smith, Emily H. Stanley, Joël Thanwerdas, Hanqin Tian, Aki Tsuruta, Francesco N. Tubiello, Thomas S. Weber, Guido R. van der Werf, Douglas E. J. Worthy, Yi Xi, Yukio Yoshida, Wenxin Zhang, Bo Zheng, Qing Zhu, Qiuan Zhu, and Qianlai Zhuang
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 1873–1958, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-1873-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-1873-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Methane (CH4) is the second most important human-influenced greenhouse gas in terms of climate forcing after carbon dioxide (CO2). A consortium of multi-disciplinary scientists synthesise and update the budget of the sources and sinks of CH4. This edition benefits from important progress in estimating emissions from lakes and ponds, reservoirs, and streams and rivers. For the 2010s decade, global CH4 emissions are estimated at 575 Tg CH4 yr-1, including ~65 % from anthropogenic sources.
Zhengyang Lin, Ling Huang, Hanqin Tian, Anping Chen, and Xuhui Wang
Geosci. Model Dev., 18, 2509–2520, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-2509-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-2509-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
The China Wildfire Emission Dataset (ChinaWED v1) estimated wildfire emissions in China during 2012–2022 as 78.13 Tg CO2, 279.47 Gg CH4, and 6.26 Gg N2O annually. Agricultural fires dominated emissions, while forest and grassland emissions decreased. Seasonal peaks occurred in late spring, with hotspots in northeast, southwest, and east China. The model emphasizes the importance of using localized emission factors and high-resolution fire estimates for accurate assessments.
Mathew Williams, David T. Milodowski, T. Luke Smallman, Kyle G. Dexter, Gabi C. Hegerl, Iain M. McNicol, Michael O'Sullivan, Carla M. Roesch, Casey M. Ryan, Stephen Sitch, and Aude Valade
Biogeosciences, 22, 1597–1614, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-1597-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-1597-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Southern African woodlands are important in both regional and global carbon cycles. A new carbon analysis created by combining satellite data with ecosystem modelling shows that the region has a neutral C balance overall but with important spatial variations. Patterns of biomass and C balance across the region are the outcome of climate controls on production and vegetation–fire interactions, which determine the mortality of vegetation and spatial variations in vegetation function.
Zhu Deng, Philippe Ciais, Liting Hu, Adrien Martinez, Marielle Saunois, Rona L. Thompson, Kushal Tibrewal, Wouter Peters, Brendan Byrne, Giacomo Grassi, Paul I. Palmer, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Zhu Liu, Junjie Liu, Xuekun Fang, Tengjiao Wang, Hanqin Tian, Katsumasa Tanaka, Ana Bastos, Stephen Sitch, Benjamin Poulter, Clément Albergel, Aki Tsuruta, Shamil Maksyutov, Rajesh Janardanan, Yosuke Niwa, Bo Zheng, Joël Thanwerdas, Dmitry Belikov, Arjo Segers, and Frédéric Chevallier
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 1121–1152, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-1121-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-1121-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
This study reconciles national greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories with updated atmospheric inversion results to evaluate discrepancies for three principal GHG fluxes at the national level. Compared to our previous study, new satellite-based CO2 inversions were included and an updated mask of managed lands was used, improving agreement for Brazil and Canada. The proposed methodology can be regularly applied as a check to assess the gap between top-down inversions and bottom-up inventories.
Tomohiro Hajima, Michio Kawamiya, Akihiko Ito, Kaoru Tachiiri, Chris D. Jones, Vivek Arora, Victor Brovkin, Roland Séférian, Spencer Liddicoat, Pierre Friedlingstein, and Elena Shevliakova
Biogeosciences, 22, 1447–1473, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-1447-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-1447-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
This study analyzes atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global carbon budgets simulated by multiple Earth system models, using several types of simulations (CO2 concentration- and emission-driven experiments). We successfully identified problems with regard to the global carbon budget in each model. We also found urgent issues with regard to land use change CO2 emissions that should be solved in the latest generation of models.
Pierre Friedlingstein, Michael O'Sullivan, Matthew W. Jones, Robbie M. Andrew, Judith Hauck, Peter Landschützer, Corinne Le Quéré, Hongmei Li, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Are Olsen, Glen P. Peters, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Robert B. Jackson, Simone R. Alin, Almut Arneth, Vivek Arora, Nicholas R. Bates, Meike Becker, Nicolas Bellouin, Carla F. Berghoff, Henry C. Bittig, Laurent Bopp, Patricia Cadule, Katie Campbell, Matthew A. Chamberlain, Naveen Chandra, Frédéric Chevallier, Louise P. Chini, Thomas Colligan, Jeanne Decayeux, Laique M. Djeutchouang, Xinyu Dou, Carolina Duran Rojas, Kazutaka Enyo, Wiley Evans, Amanda R. Fay, Richard A. Feely, Daniel J. Ford, Adrianna Foster, Thomas Gasser, Marion Gehlen, Thanos Gkritzalis, Giacomo Grassi, Luke Gregor, Nicolas Gruber, Özgür Gürses, Ian Harris, Matthew Hefner, Jens Heinke, George C. Hurtt, Yosuke Iida, Tatiana Ilyina, Andrew R. Jacobson, Atul K. Jain, Tereza Jarníková, Annika Jersild, Fei Jiang, Zhe Jin, Etsushi Kato, Ralph F. Keeling, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jürgen Knauer, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Xin Lan, Siv K. Lauvset, Nathalie Lefèvre, Zhu Liu, Junjie Liu, Lei Ma, Shamil Maksyutov, Gregg Marland, Nicolas Mayot, Patrick C. McGuire, Nicolas Metzl, Natalie M. Monacci, Eric J. Morgan, Shin-Ichiro Nakaoka, Craig Neill, Yosuke Niwa, Tobias Nützel, Lea Olivier, Tsuneo Ono, Paul I. Palmer, Denis Pierrot, Zhangcai Qin, Laure Resplandy, Alizée Roobaert, Thais M. Rosan, Christian Rödenbeck, Jörg Schwinger, T. Luke Smallman, Stephen M. Smith, Reinel Sospedra-Alfonso, Tobias Steinhoff, Qing Sun, Adrienne J. Sutton, Roland Séférian, Shintaro Takao, Hiroaki Tatebe, Hanqin Tian, Bronte Tilbrook, Olivier Torres, Etienne Tourigny, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Francesco Tubiello, Guido van der Werf, Rik Wanninkhof, Xuhui Wang, Dongxu Yang, Xiaojuan Yang, Zhen Yu, Wenping Yuan, Xu Yue, Sönke Zaehle, Ning Zeng, and Jiye Zeng
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 965–1039, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-965-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-965-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
The Global Carbon Budget 2024 describes the methodology, main results, and datasets used to quantify the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and their partitioning among the atmosphere, land ecosystems, and the ocean over the historical period (1750–2024). These living datasets are updated every year to provide the highest transparency and traceability in the reporting of CO2, the key driver of climate change.
Narender Reddy Kangari, Somnath Baidya Roy, Sam S. Rabin, Danica L. Lombardozzi, Gudimetla Venkateswara Varma, Ruchira Biswas, and Devavat Chiru Naik
Geosci. Model Dev., 18, 763–785, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-763-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-18-763-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
The study aimed to improve the representation of wheat and rice in a land model for the Indian region. The modified model performed significantly better than the default model in simulating crop phenology, yield, and carbon, water, and energy fluxes compared to observations. The study highlights the need for global land models to use region-specific crop parameters for accurately simulating vegetation processes and land surface processes.
Zhen Zhang, Benjamin Poulter, Joe R. Melton, William J. Riley, George H. Allen, David J. Beerling, Philippe Bousquet, Josep G. Canadell, Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, Philippe Ciais, Nicola Gedney, Peter O. Hopcroft, Akihiko Ito, Robert B. Jackson, Atul K. Jain, Katherine Jensen, Fortunat Joos, Thomas Kleinen, Sara H. Knox, Tingting Li, Xin Li, Xiangyu Liu, Kyle McDonald, Gavin McNicol, Paul A. Miller, Jurek Müller, Prabir K. Patra, Changhui Peng, Shushi Peng, Zhangcai Qin, Ryan M. Riggs, Marielle Saunois, Qing Sun, Hanqin Tian, Xiaoming Xu, Yuanzhi Yao, Yi Xi, Wenxin Zhang, Qing Zhu, Qiuan Zhu, and Qianlai Zhuang
Biogeosciences, 22, 305–321, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-305-2025, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-22-305-2025, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
This study assesses global methane emissions from wetlands between 2000 and 2020 using multiple models. We found that wetland emissions increased by 6–7 Tg CH4 yr-1 in the 2010s compared to the 2000s. Rising temperatures primarily drove this increase, while changes in precipitation and CO2 levels also played roles. Our findings highlight the importance of wetlands in the global methane budget and the need for continuous monitoring to understand their impact on climate change.
Yona Silvy, Thomas L. Frölicher, Jens Terhaar, Fortunat Joos, Friedrich A. Burger, Fabrice Lacroix, Myles Allen, Raffaele Bernardello, Laurent Bopp, Victor Brovkin, Jonathan R. Buzan, Patricia Cadule, Martin Dix, John Dunne, Pierre Friedlingstein, Goran Georgievski, Tomohiro Hajima, Stuart Jenkins, Michio Kawamiya, Nancy Y. Kiang, Vladimir Lapin, Donghyun Lee, Paul Lerner, Nadine Mengis, Estela A. Monteiro, David Paynter, Glen P. Peters, Anastasia Romanou, Jörg Schwinger, Sarah Sparrow, Eric Stofferahn, Jerry Tjiputra, Etienne Tourigny, and Tilo Ziehn
Earth Syst. Dynam., 15, 1591–1628, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-1591-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-1591-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
The adaptive emission reduction approach is applied with Earth system models to generate temperature stabilization simulations. These simulations provide compatible emission pathways and budgets for a given warming level, uncovering uncertainty ranges previously missing in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project scenarios. These target-based emission-driven simulations offer a more coherent assessment across models for studying both the carbon cycle and its impacts under climate stabilization.
Bettina K. Gier, Manuel Schlund, Pierre Friedlingstein, Chris D. Jones, Colin Jones, Sönke Zaehle, and Veronika Eyring
Biogeosciences, 21, 5321–5360, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-5321-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-5321-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
This study investigates present-day carbon cycle variables in CMIP5 and CMIP6 simulations. Overall, CMIP6 models perform better but also show many remaining biases. A significant improvement in the simulation of photosynthesis in models with a nitrogen cycle is found, with only small differences between emission- and concentration-based simulations. Thus, we recommend using emission-driven simulations in CMIP7 by default and including the nitrogen cycle in all future carbon cycle models.
Benjamin M. Sanderson, Ben B. B. Booth, John Dunne, Veronika Eyring, Rosie A. Fisher, Pierre Friedlingstein, Matthew J. Gidden, Tomohiro Hajima, Chris D. Jones, Colin G. Jones, Andrew King, Charles D. Koven, David M. Lawrence, Jason Lowe, Nadine Mengis, Glen P. Peters, Joeri Rogelj, Chris Smith, Abigail C. Snyder, Isla R. Simpson, Abigail L. S. Swann, Claudia Tebaldi, Tatiana Ilyina, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Roland Séférian, Bjørn H. Samset, Detlef van Vuuren, and Sönke Zaehle
Geosci. Model Dev., 17, 8141–8172, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-8141-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-8141-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
We discuss how, in order to provide more relevant guidance for climate policy, coordinated climate experiments should adopt a greater focus on simulations where Earth system models are provided with carbon emissions from fossil fuels together with land use change instructions, rather than past approaches that have largely focused on experiments with prescribed atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. We discuss how these goals might be achieved in coordinated climate modeling experiments.
Flossie Brown, Gerd Folberth, Stephen Sitch, Paulo Artaxo, Marijn Bauters, Pascal Boeckx, Alexander W. Cheesman, Matteo Detto, Ninong Komala, Luciana Rizzo, Nestor Rojas, Ines dos Santos Vieira, Steven Turnock, Hans Verbeeck, and Alfonso Zambrano
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 24, 12537–12555, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-12537-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-12537-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
Ozone is a pollutant that is detrimental to human and plant health. Ozone monitoring sites in the tropics are limited, so models are often used to understand ozone exposure. We use measurements from the tropics to evaluate ozone from the UK Earth system model, UKESM1. UKESM1 is able to capture the pattern of ozone in the tropics, except in southeast Asia, although it systematically overestimates it at all sites. This work highlights that UKESM1 can capture seasonal and hourly variability.
Colin G. Jones, Fanny Adloff, Ben B. B. Booth, Peter M. Cox, Veronika Eyring, Pierre Friedlingstein, Katja Frieler, Helene T. Hewitt, Hazel A. Jeffery, Sylvie Joussaume, Torben Koenigk, Bryan N. Lawrence, Eleanor O'Rourke, Malcolm J. Roberts, Benjamin M. Sanderson, Roland Séférian, Samuel Somot, Pier Luigi Vidale, Detlef van Vuuren, Mario Acosta, Mats Bentsen, Raffaele Bernardello, Richard Betts, Ed Blockley, Julien Boé, Tom Bracegirdle, Pascale Braconnot, Victor Brovkin, Carlo Buontempo, Francisco Doblas-Reyes, Markus Donat, Italo Epicoco, Pete Falloon, Sandro Fiore, Thomas Frölicher, Neven S. Fučkar, Matthew J. Gidden, Helge F. Goessling, Rune Grand Graversen, Silvio Gualdi, José M. Gutiérrez, Tatiana Ilyina, Daniela Jacob, Chris D. Jones, Martin Juckes, Elizabeth Kendon, Erik Kjellström, Reto Knutti, Jason Lowe, Matthew Mizielinski, Paola Nassisi, Michael Obersteiner, Pierre Regnier, Romain Roehrig, David Salas y Mélia, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Michael Schulz, Enrico Scoccimarro, Laurent Terray, Hannes Thiemann, Richard A. Wood, Shuting Yang, and Sönke Zaehle
Earth Syst. Dynam., 15, 1319–1351, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-1319-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-1319-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
We propose a number of priority areas for the international climate research community to address over the coming decade. Advances in these areas will both increase our understanding of past and future Earth system change, including the societal and environmental impacts of this change, and deliver significantly improved scientific support to international climate policy, such as future IPCC assessments and the UNFCCC Global Stocktake.
Fang Li, Zhimin Zhou, Samuel Levis, Stephen Sitch, Felicity Hayes, Zhaozhong Feng, Peter B. Reich, Zhiyi Zhao, and Yanqing Zhou
Geosci. Model Dev., 17, 6173–6193, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-6173-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-6173-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
A new scheme is developed to model the surface ozone damage to vegetation in regional and global process-based models. Based on 4210 data points from ozone experiments, it accurately reproduces statistically significant linear or nonlinear photosynthetic and stomatal responses to ozone in observations for all vegetation types. It also enables models to implicitly capture the variability in plant ozone tolerance and the shift among species within a vegetation type.
Rebecca M. Varney, Pierre Friedlingstein, Sarah E. Chadburn, Eleanor J. Burke, and Peter M. Cox
Biogeosciences, 21, 2759–2776, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-2759-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-2759-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
Soil carbon is the largest store of carbon on the land surface of Earth and is known to be particularly sensitive to climate change. Understanding this future response is vital to successfully meeting Paris Agreement targets, which rely heavily on carbon uptake by the land surface. In this study, the individual responses of soil carbon are quantified and compared amongst CMIP6 Earth system models used within the most recent IPCC report, and the role of soils in the land response is highlighted.
Hanqin Tian, Naiqing Pan, Rona L. Thompson, Josep G. Canadell, Parvadha Suntharalingam, Pierre Regnier, Eric A. Davidson, Michael Prather, Philippe Ciais, Marilena Muntean, Shufen Pan, Wilfried Winiwarter, Sönke Zaehle, Feng Zhou, Robert B. Jackson, Hermann W. Bange, Sarah Berthet, Zihao Bian, Daniele Bianchi, Alexander F. Bouwman, Erik T. Buitenhuis, Geoffrey Dutton, Minpeng Hu, Akihiko Ito, Atul K. Jain, Aurich Jeltsch-Thömmes, Fortunat Joos, Sian Kou-Giesbrecht, Paul B. Krummel, Xin Lan, Angela Landolfi, Ronny Lauerwald, Ya Li, Chaoqun Lu, Taylor Maavara, Manfredi Manizza, Dylan B. Millet, Jens Mühle, Prabir K. Patra, Glen P. Peters, Xiaoyu Qin, Peter Raymond, Laure Resplandy, Judith A. Rosentreter, Hao Shi, Qing Sun, Daniele Tonina, Francesco N. Tubiello, Guido R. van der Werf, Nicolas Vuichard, Junjie Wang, Kelley C. Wells, Luke M. Western, Chris Wilson, Jia Yang, Yuanzhi Yao, Yongfa You, and Qing Zhu
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 16, 2543–2604, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-2543-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-2543-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
Atmospheric concentrations of nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas 273 times more potent than carbon dioxide, have increased by 25 % since the preindustrial period, with the highest observed growth rate in 2020 and 2021. This rapid growth rate has primarily been due to a 40 % increase in anthropogenic emissions since 1980. Observed atmospheric N2O concentrations in recent years have exceeded the worst-case climate scenario, underscoring the importance of reducing anthropogenic N2O emissions.
Piers M. Forster, Chris Smith, Tristram Walsh, William F. Lamb, Robin Lamboll, Bradley Hall, Mathias Hauser, Aurélien Ribes, Debbie Rosen, Nathan P. Gillett, Matthew D. Palmer, Joeri Rogelj, Karina von Schuckmann, Blair Trewin, Myles Allen, Robbie Andrew, Richard A. Betts, Alex Borger, Tim Boyer, Jiddu A. Broersma, Carlo Buontempo, Samantha Burgess, Chiara Cagnazzo, Lijing Cheng, Pierre Friedlingstein, Andrew Gettelman, Johannes Gütschow, Masayoshi Ishii, Stuart Jenkins, Xin Lan, Colin Morice, Jens Mühle, Christopher Kadow, John Kennedy, Rachel E. Killick, Paul B. Krummel, Jan C. Minx, Gunnar Myhre, Vaishali Naik, Glen P. Peters, Anna Pirani, Julia Pongratz, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Sophie Szopa, Peter Thorne, Mahesh V. M. Kovilakam, Elisa Majamäki, Jukka-Pekka Jalkanen, Margreet van Marle, Rachel M. Hoesly, Robert Rohde, Dominik Schumacher, Guido van der Werf, Russell Vose, Kirsten Zickfeld, Xuebin Zhang, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, and Panmao Zhai
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 16, 2625–2658, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-2625-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-2625-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
This paper tracks some key indicators of global warming through time, from 1850 through to the end of 2023. It is designed to give an authoritative estimate of global warming to date and its causes. We find that in 2023, global warming reached 1.3 °C and is increasing at over 0.2 °C per decade. This is caused by all-time-high greenhouse gas emissions.
Wolfgang Alexander Obermeier, Clemens Schwingshackl, Ana Bastos, Giulia Conchedda, Thomas Gasser, Giacomo Grassi, Richard A. Houghton, Francesco Nicola Tubiello, Stephen Sitch, and Julia Pongratz
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 16, 605–645, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-605-2024, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-605-2024, 2024
Short summary
Short summary
We provide and compare country-level estimates of land-use CO2 fluxes from a variety and large number of models, bottom-up estimates, and country reports for the period 1950–2021. Although net fluxes are small in many countries, they are often composed of large compensating emissions and removals. In many countries, the estimates agree well once their individual characteristics are accounted for, but in other countries, including some of the largest emitters, substantial uncertainties exist.
Sam S. Rabin, William J. Sacks, Danica L. Lombardozzi, Lili Xia, and Alan Robock
Geosci. Model Dev., 16, 7253–7273, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-7253-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-7253-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
Climate models can help us simulate how the agricultural system will be affected by and respond to environmental change, but to be trustworthy they must realistically reproduce historical patterns. When farmers plant their crops and what varieties they choose will be important aspects of future adaptation. Here, we improve the crop component of a global model to better simulate observed growing seasons and examine the impacts on simulated crop yields and irrigation demand.
Pierre Friedlingstein, Michael O'Sullivan, Matthew W. Jones, Robbie M. Andrew, Dorothee C. E. Bakker, Judith Hauck, Peter Landschützer, Corinne Le Quéré, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Glen P. Peters, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Robert B. Jackson, Simone R. Alin, Peter Anthoni, Leticia Barbero, Nicholas R. Bates, Meike Becker, Nicolas Bellouin, Bertrand Decharme, Laurent Bopp, Ida Bagus Mandhara Brasika, Patricia Cadule, Matthew A. Chamberlain, Naveen Chandra, Thi-Tuyet-Trang Chau, Frédéric Chevallier, Louise P. Chini, Margot Cronin, Xinyu Dou, Kazutaka Enyo, Wiley Evans, Stefanie Falk, Richard A. Feely, Liang Feng, Daniel J. Ford, Thomas Gasser, Josefine Ghattas, Thanos Gkritzalis, Giacomo Grassi, Luke Gregor, Nicolas Gruber, Özgür Gürses, Ian Harris, Matthew Hefner, Jens Heinke, Richard A. Houghton, George C. Hurtt, Yosuke Iida, Tatiana Ilyina, Andrew R. Jacobson, Atul Jain, Tereza Jarníková, Annika Jersild, Fei Jiang, Zhe Jin, Fortunat Joos, Etsushi Kato, Ralph F. Keeling, Daniel Kennedy, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jürgen Knauer, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Arne Körtzinger, Xin Lan, Nathalie Lefèvre, Hongmei Li, Junjie Liu, Zhiqiang Liu, Lei Ma, Greg Marland, Nicolas Mayot, Patrick C. McGuire, Galen A. McKinley, Gesa Meyer, Eric J. Morgan, David R. Munro, Shin-Ichiro Nakaoka, Yosuke Niwa, Kevin M. O'Brien, Are Olsen, Abdirahman M. Omar, Tsuneo Ono, Melf Paulsen, Denis Pierrot, Katie Pocock, Benjamin Poulter, Carter M. Powis, Gregor Rehder, Laure Resplandy, Eddy Robertson, Christian Rödenbeck, Thais M. Rosan, Jörg Schwinger, Roland Séférian, T. Luke Smallman, Stephen M. Smith, Reinel Sospedra-Alfonso, Qing Sun, Adrienne J. Sutton, Colm Sweeney, Shintaro Takao, Pieter P. Tans, Hanqin Tian, Bronte Tilbrook, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Francesco Tubiello, Guido R. van der Werf, Erik van Ooijen, Rik Wanninkhof, Michio Watanabe, Cathy Wimart-Rousseau, Dongxu Yang, Xiaojuan Yang, Wenping Yuan, Xu Yue, Sönke Zaehle, Jiye Zeng, and Bo Zheng
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 5301–5369, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-5301-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-5301-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
The Global Carbon Budget 2023 describes the methodology, main results, and data sets used to quantify the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and their partitioning among the atmosphere, land ecosystems, and the ocean over the historical period (1750–2023). These living datasets are updated every year to provide the highest transparency and traceability in the reporting of CO2, the key driver of climate change.
Zi Huang, Jiaoyue Wang, Longfei Bing, Yijiao Qiu, Rui Guo, Ying Yu, Mingjing Ma, Le Niu, Dan Tong, Robbie M. Andrew, Pierre Friedlingstein, Josep G. Canadell, Fengming Xi, and Zhu Liu
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 4947–4958, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-4947-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-4947-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
This is about global and regional cement process carbon emissions and CO2 uptake calculations from 1930 to 2019. The global cement production is rising to 4.4 Gt, causing processing carbon emission of 1.81 Gt (95% CI: 1.75–1.88 Gt CO2) in 2021. Plus, in 2021, cement’s carbon accumulated uptake (22.9 Gt, 95% CI: 19.6–22.6 Gt CO2) has offset 55.2% of cement process CO2 emissions (41.5 Gt, 95% CI: 38.7–47.1 Gt CO2) since 1930.
Danica L. Lombardozzi, William R. Wieder, Negin Sobhani, Gordon B. Bonan, David Durden, Dawn Lenz, Michael SanClements, Samantha Weintraub-Leff, Edward Ayres, Christopher R. Florian, Kyla Dahlin, Sanjiv Kumar, Abigail L. S. Swann, Claire M. Zarakas, Charles Vardeman, and Valerio Pascucci
Geosci. Model Dev., 16, 5979–6000, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-5979-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-5979-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
We present a novel cyberinfrastructure system that uses National Ecological Observatory Network measurements to run Community Terrestrial System Model point simulations in a containerized system. The simple interface and tutorials expand access to data and models used in Earth system research by removing technical barriers and facilitating research, educational opportunities, and community engagement. The NCAR–NEON system enables convergence of climate and ecological sciences.
Matthew J. McGrath, Ana Maria Roxana Petrescu, Philippe Peylin, Robbie M. Andrew, Bradley Matthews, Frank Dentener, Juraj Balkovič, Vladislav Bastrikov, Meike Becker, Gregoire Broquet, Philippe Ciais, Audrey Fortems-Cheiney, Raphael Ganzenmüller, Giacomo Grassi, Ian Harris, Matthew Jones, Jürgen Knauer, Matthias Kuhnert, Guillaume Monteil, Saqr Munassar, Paul I. Palmer, Glen P. Peters, Chunjing Qiu, Mart-Jan Schelhaas, Oksana Tarasova, Matteo Vizzarri, Karina Winkler, Gianpaolo Balsamo, Antoine Berchet, Peter Briggs, Patrick Brockmann, Frédéric Chevallier, Giulia Conchedda, Monica Crippa, Stijn N. C. Dellaert, Hugo A. C. Denier van der Gon, Sara Filipek, Pierre Friedlingstein, Richard Fuchs, Michael Gauss, Christoph Gerbig, Diego Guizzardi, Dirk Günther, Richard A. Houghton, Greet Janssens-Maenhout, Ronny Lauerwald, Bas Lerink, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Géraud Moulas, Marilena Muntean, Gert-Jan Nabuurs, Aurélie Paquirissamy, Lucia Perugini, Wouter Peters, Roberto Pilli, Julia Pongratz, Pierre Regnier, Marko Scholze, Yusuf Serengil, Pete Smith, Efisio Solazzo, Rona L. Thompson, Francesco N. Tubiello, Timo Vesala, and Sophia Walther
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 4295–4370, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-4295-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-4295-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
Accurate estimation of fluxes of carbon dioxide from the land surface is essential for understanding future impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the climate system. A wide variety of methods currently exist to estimate these sources and sinks. We are continuing work to develop annual comparisons of these diverse methods in order to clarify what they all actually calculate and to resolve apparent disagreement, in addition to highlighting opportunities for increased understanding.
Sian Kou-Giesbrecht, Vivek K. Arora, Christian Seiler, Almut Arneth, Stefanie Falk, Atul K. Jain, Fortunat Joos, Daniel Kennedy, Jürgen Knauer, Stephen Sitch, Michael O'Sullivan, Naiqing Pan, Qing Sun, Hanqin Tian, Nicolas Vuichard, and Sönke Zaehle
Earth Syst. Dynam., 14, 767–795, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-14-767-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-14-767-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
Nitrogen (N) is an essential limiting nutrient to terrestrial carbon (C) sequestration. We evaluate N cycling in an ensemble of terrestrial biosphere models. We find that variability in N processes across models is large. Models tended to overestimate C storage per unit N in vegetation and soil, which could have consequences for projecting the future terrestrial C sink. However, N cycling measurements are highly uncertain, and more are necessary to guide the development of N cycling in models.
Piers M. Forster, Christopher J. Smith, Tristram Walsh, William F. Lamb, Robin Lamboll, Mathias Hauser, Aurélien Ribes, Debbie Rosen, Nathan Gillett, Matthew D. Palmer, Joeri Rogelj, Karina von Schuckmann, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Blair Trewin, Xuebin Zhang, Myles Allen, Robbie Andrew, Arlene Birt, Alex Borger, Tim Boyer, Jiddu A. Broersma, Lijing Cheng, Frank Dentener, Pierre Friedlingstein, José M. Gutiérrez, Johannes Gütschow, Bradley Hall, Masayoshi Ishii, Stuart Jenkins, Xin Lan, June-Yi Lee, Colin Morice, Christopher Kadow, John Kennedy, Rachel Killick, Jan C. Minx, Vaishali Naik, Glen P. Peters, Anna Pirani, Julia Pongratz, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Sophie Szopa, Peter Thorne, Robert Rohde, Maisa Rojas Corradi, Dominik Schumacher, Russell Vose, Kirsten Zickfeld, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, and Panmao Zhai
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 2295–2327, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-2295-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-2295-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
This is a critical decade for climate action, but there is no annual tracking of the level of human-induced warming. We build on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports that are authoritative but published infrequently to create a set of key global climate indicators that can be tracked through time. Our hope is that this becomes an important annual publication that policymakers, media, scientists and the public can refer to.
Aparnna Ravi, Dhanyalekshmi Pillai, Christoph Gerbig, Stephen Sitch, Sönke Zaehle, Vishnu Thilakan, and Chandra Shekhar Jha
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-817, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-817, 2023
Preprint archived
Short summary
Short summary
We derive high-resolution terrestrial CO2 fluxes over India from 2012 to 2020. This is achieved by utilizing satellite-based vegetation indices and meteorological data in a data-driven biospheric model. The model simulations are improved by incorporating soil variables and SIF retrievals from satellite instruments and relate them to ecosystem productivity across different biomes. The derived flux products better explain the flux variability compared to other existing model estimates.
Yimian Ma, Xu Yue, Stephen Sitch, Nadine Unger, Johan Uddling, Lina M. Mercado, Cheng Gong, Zhaozhong Feng, Huiyi Yang, Hao Zhou, Chenguang Tian, Yang Cao, Yadong Lei, Alexander W. Cheesman, Yansen Xu, and Maria Carolina Duran Rojas
Geosci. Model Dev., 16, 2261–2276, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-2261-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-2261-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
Plants have been found to respond differently to O3, but the variations in the sensitivities have rarely been explained nor fully implemented in large-scale assessment. This study proposes a new O3 damage scheme with leaf mass per area to unify varied sensitivities for all plant species. Our assessment reveals an O3-induced reduction of 4.8 % in global GPP, with the highest reduction of >10 % for cropland, suggesting an emerging risk of crop yield loss under the threat of O3 pollution.
Ana Maria Roxana Petrescu, Chunjing Qiu, Matthew J. McGrath, Philippe Peylin, Glen P. Peters, Philippe Ciais, Rona L. Thompson, Aki Tsuruta, Dominik Brunner, Matthias Kuhnert, Bradley Matthews, Paul I. Palmer, Oksana Tarasova, Pierre Regnier, Ronny Lauerwald, David Bastviken, Lena Höglund-Isaksson, Wilfried Winiwarter, Giuseppe Etiope, Tuula Aalto, Gianpaolo Balsamo, Vladislav Bastrikov, Antoine Berchet, Patrick Brockmann, Giancarlo Ciotoli, Giulia Conchedda, Monica Crippa, Frank Dentener, Christine D. Groot Zwaaftink, Diego Guizzardi, Dirk Günther, Jean-Matthieu Haussaire, Sander Houweling, Greet Janssens-Maenhout, Massaer Kouyate, Adrian Leip, Antti Leppänen, Emanuele Lugato, Manon Maisonnier, Alistair J. Manning, Tiina Markkanen, Joe McNorton, Marilena Muntean, Gabriel D. Oreggioni, Prabir K. Patra, Lucia Perugini, Isabelle Pison, Maarit T. Raivonen, Marielle Saunois, Arjo J. Segers, Pete Smith, Efisio Solazzo, Hanqin Tian, Francesco N. Tubiello, Timo Vesala, Guido R. van der Werf, Chris Wilson, and Sönke Zaehle
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 1197–1268, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-1197-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-1197-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
This study updates the state-of-the-art scientific overview of CH4 and N2O emissions in the EU27 and UK in Petrescu et al. (2021a). Yearly updates are needed to improve the different respective approaches and to inform on the development of formal verification systems. It integrates the most recent emission inventories, process-based model and regional/global inversions, comparing them with UNFCCC national GHG inventories, in support to policy to facilitate real-time verification procedures.
Giacomo Grassi, Clemens Schwingshackl, Thomas Gasser, Richard A. Houghton, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Alessandro Cescatti, Philippe Ciais, Sandro Federici, Pierre Friedlingstein, Werner A. Kurz, Maria J. Sanz Sanchez, Raúl Abad Viñas, Ramdane Alkama, Selma Bultan, Guido Ceccherini, Stefanie Falk, Etsushi Kato, Daniel Kennedy, Jürgen Knauer, Anu Korosuo, Joana Melo, Matthew J. McGrath, Julia E. M. S. Nabel, Benjamin Poulter, Anna A. Romanovskaya, Simone Rossi, Hanqin Tian, Anthony P. Walker, Wenping Yuan, Xu Yue, and Julia Pongratz
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 1093–1114, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-1093-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-1093-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
Striking differences exist in estimates of land-use CO2 fluxes between the national greenhouse gas inventories and the IPCC assessment reports. These differences hamper an accurate assessment of the collective progress under the Paris Agreement. By implementing an approach that conceptually reconciles land-use CO2 flux from national inventories and the global models used by the IPCC, our study is an important step forward for increasing confidence in land-use CO2 flux estimates.
Brendan Byrne, David F. Baker, Sourish Basu, Michael Bertolacci, Kevin W. Bowman, Dustin Carroll, Abhishek Chatterjee, Frédéric Chevallier, Philippe Ciais, Noel Cressie, David Crisp, Sean Crowell, Feng Deng, Zhu Deng, Nicholas M. Deutscher, Manvendra K. Dubey, Sha Feng, Omaira E. García, David W. T. Griffith, Benedikt Herkommer, Lei Hu, Andrew R. Jacobson, Rajesh Janardanan, Sujong Jeong, Matthew S. Johnson, Dylan B. A. Jones, Rigel Kivi, Junjie Liu, Zhiqiang Liu, Shamil Maksyutov, John B. Miller, Scot M. Miller, Isamu Morino, Justus Notholt, Tomohiro Oda, Christopher W. O'Dell, Young-Suk Oh, Hirofumi Ohyama, Prabir K. Patra, Hélène Peiro, Christof Petri, Sajeev Philip, David F. Pollard, Benjamin Poulter, Marine Remaud, Andrew Schuh, Mahesh K. Sha, Kei Shiomi, Kimberly Strong, Colm Sweeney, Yao Té, Hanqin Tian, Voltaire A. Velazco, Mihalis Vrekoussis, Thorsten Warneke, John R. Worden, Debra Wunch, Yuanzhi Yao, Jeongmin Yun, Andrew Zammit-Mangion, and Ning Zeng
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 963–1004, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-963-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-963-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
Changes in the carbon stocks of terrestrial ecosystems result in emissions and removals of CO2. These can be driven by anthropogenic activities (e.g., deforestation), natural processes (e.g., fires) or in response to rising CO2 (e.g., CO2 fertilization). This paper describes a dataset of CO2 emissions and removals derived from atmospheric CO2 observations. This pilot dataset informs current capabilities and future developments towards top-down monitoring and verification systems.
Xiaoyong Li, Hanqin Tian, Chaoqun Lu, and Shufen Pan
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 1005–1035, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-1005-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-1005-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
We reconstructed land use and land cover (LULC) history for the conterminous United States during 1630–2020 by integrating multi-source data. The results show the widespread expansion of cropland and urban land and the shrinking of natural vegetation in the past four centuries. Forest planting and regeneration accelerated forest recovery since the 1920s. The datasets can be used to assess the LULC impacts on the ecosystem's carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles.
Rainer Schneck, Veronika Gayler, Julia E. M. S. Nabel, Thomas Raddatz, Christian H. Reick, and Reiner Schnur
Geosci. Model Dev., 15, 8581–8611, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-8581-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-8581-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
The versions of ICON-A and ICON-Land/JSBACHv4 used for this study constitute the first milestone in the development of the new ICON Earth System Model ICON-ESM. JSBACHv4 is the successor of JSBACHv3, and most of the parameterizations of JSBACHv4 are re-implementations from JSBACHv3. We assess and compare the performance of JSBACHv4 and JSBACHv3. Overall, the JSBACHv4 results are as good as JSBACHv3, but both models reveal the same main shortcomings, e.g. the depiction of the leaf area index.
Pierre Friedlingstein, Michael O'Sullivan, Matthew W. Jones, Robbie M. Andrew, Luke Gregor, Judith Hauck, Corinne Le Quéré, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Are Olsen, Glen P. Peters, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Robert B. Jackson, Simone R. Alin, Ramdane Alkama, Almut Arneth, Vivek K. Arora, Nicholas R. Bates, Meike Becker, Nicolas Bellouin, Henry C. Bittig, Laurent Bopp, Frédéric Chevallier, Louise P. Chini, Margot Cronin, Wiley Evans, Stefanie Falk, Richard A. Feely, Thomas Gasser, Marion Gehlen, Thanos Gkritzalis, Lucas Gloege, Giacomo Grassi, Nicolas Gruber, Özgür Gürses, Ian Harris, Matthew Hefner, Richard A. Houghton, George C. Hurtt, Yosuke Iida, Tatiana Ilyina, Atul K. Jain, Annika Jersild, Koji Kadono, Etsushi Kato, Daniel Kennedy, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jürgen Knauer, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Peter Landschützer, Nathalie Lefèvre, Keith Lindsay, Junjie Liu, Zhu Liu, Gregg Marland, Nicolas Mayot, Matthew J. McGrath, Nicolas Metzl, Natalie M. Monacci, David R. Munro, Shin-Ichiro Nakaoka, Yosuke Niwa, Kevin O'Brien, Tsuneo Ono, Paul I. Palmer, Naiqing Pan, Denis Pierrot, Katie Pocock, Benjamin Poulter, Laure Resplandy, Eddy Robertson, Christian Rödenbeck, Carmen Rodriguez, Thais M. Rosan, Jörg Schwinger, Roland Séférian, Jamie D. Shutler, Ingunn Skjelvan, Tobias Steinhoff, Qing Sun, Adrienne J. Sutton, Colm Sweeney, Shintaro Takao, Toste Tanhua, Pieter P. Tans, Xiangjun Tian, Hanqin Tian, Bronte Tilbrook, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Francesco Tubiello, Guido R. van der Werf, Anthony P. Walker, Rik Wanninkhof, Chris Whitehead, Anna Willstrand Wranne, Rebecca Wright, Wenping Yuan, Chao Yue, Xu Yue, Sönke Zaehle, Jiye Zeng, and Bo Zheng
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 4811–4900, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-4811-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-4811-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
The Global Carbon Budget 2022 describes the datasets and methodology used to quantify the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and their partitioning among the atmosphere, the land ecosystems, and the ocean. These living datasets are updated every year to provide the highest transparency and traceability in the reporting of CO2, the key driver of climate change.
Hanqin Tian, Zihao Bian, Hao Shi, Xiaoyu Qin, Naiqing Pan, Chaoqun Lu, Shufen Pan, Francesco N. Tubiello, Jinfeng Chang, Giulia Conchedda, Junguo Liu, Nathaniel Mueller, Kazuya Nishina, Rongting Xu, Jia Yang, Liangzhi You, and Bowen Zhang
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 4551–4568, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-4551-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-4551-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
Nitrogen is one of the critical nutrients for growth. Evaluating the change in nitrogen inputs due to human activity is necessary for nutrient management and pollution control. In this study, we generated a historical dataset of nitrogen input to land at the global scale. This dataset consists of nitrogen fertilizer, manure, and atmospheric deposition inputs to cropland, pasture, and rangeland at high resolution from 1860 to 2019.
Brendan Byrne, Junjie Liu, Yonghong Yi, Abhishek Chatterjee, Sourish Basu, Rui Cheng, Russell Doughty, Frédéric Chevallier, Kevin W. Bowman, Nicholas C. Parazoo, David Crisp, Xing Li, Jingfeng Xiao, Stephen Sitch, Bertrand Guenet, Feng Deng, Matthew S. Johnson, Sajeev Philip, Patrick C. McGuire, and Charles E. Miller
Biogeosciences, 19, 4779–4799, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-19-4779-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-19-4779-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
Plants draw CO2 from the atmosphere during the growing season, while respiration releases CO2 to the atmosphere throughout the year, driving seasonal variations in atmospheric CO2 that can be observed by satellites, such as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2). Using OCO-2 XCO2 data and space-based constraints on plant growth, we show that permafrost-rich northeast Eurasia has a strong seasonal release of CO2 during the autumn, hinting at an unexpectedly large respiration signal from soils.
Flossie Brown, Gerd A. Folberth, Stephen Sitch, Susanne Bauer, Marijn Bauters, Pascal Boeckx, Alexander W. Cheesman, Makoto Deushi, Inês Dos Santos Vieira, Corinne Galy-Lacaux, James Haywood, James Keeble, Lina M. Mercado, Fiona M. O'Connor, Naga Oshima, Kostas Tsigaridis, and Hans Verbeeck
Atmos. Chem. Phys., 22, 12331–12352, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-12331-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-12331-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
Surface ozone can decrease plant productivity and impair human health. In this study, we evaluate the change in surface ozone due to climate change over South America and Africa using Earth system models. We find that if the climate were to change according to the worst-case scenario used here, models predict that forested areas in biomass burning locations and urban populations will be at increasing risk of ozone exposure, but other areas will experience a climate benefit.
Stephen G. Yeager, Nan Rosenbloom, Anne A. Glanville, Xian Wu, Isla Simpson, Hui Li, Maria J. Molina, Kristen Krumhardt, Samuel Mogen, Keith Lindsay, Danica Lombardozzi, Will Wieder, Who M. Kim, Jadwiga H. Richter, Matthew Long, Gokhan Danabasoglu, David Bailey, Marika Holland, Nicole Lovenduski, Warren G. Strand, and Teagan King
Geosci. Model Dev., 15, 6451–6493, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-6451-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-6451-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
The Earth system changes over a range of time and space scales, and some of these changes are predictable in advance. Short-term weather forecasts are most familiar, but recent work has shown that it is possible to generate useful predictions several seasons or even a decade in advance. This study focuses on predictions over intermediate timescales (up to 24 months in advance) and shows that there is promising potential to forecast a variety of changes in the natural environment.
Taraka Davies-Barnard, Sönke Zaehle, and Pierre Friedlingstein
Biogeosciences, 19, 3491–3503, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-19-3491-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-19-3491-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
Biological nitrogen fixation is the largest natural input of new nitrogen onto land. Earth system models mainly represent global total terrestrial biological nitrogen fixation within observational uncertainties but overestimate tropical fixation. The model range of increase in biological nitrogen fixation in the SSP3-7.0 scenario is 3 % to 87 %. While biological nitrogen fixation is a key source of new nitrogen, its predictive power for net primary productivity in models is limited.
Mahdi André Nakhavali, Lina M. Mercado, Iain P. Hartley, Stephen Sitch, Fernanda V. Cunha, Raffaello di Ponzio, Laynara F. Lugli, Carlos A. Quesada, Kelly M. Andersen, Sarah E. Chadburn, Andy J. Wiltshire, Douglas B. Clark, Gyovanni Ribeiro, Lara Siebert, Anna C. M. Moraes, Jéssica Schmeisk Rosa, Rafael Assis, and José L. Camargo
Geosci. Model Dev., 15, 5241–5269, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-5241-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-5241-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
In tropical ecosystems, the availability of rock-derived elements such as P can be very low. Thus, without a representation of P cycling, tropical forest responses to rising atmospheric CO2 conditions in areas such as Amazonia remain highly uncertain. We introduced P dynamics and its interactions with the N and P cycles into the JULES model. Our results highlight the potential for high P limitation and therefore lower CO2 fertilization capacity in the Amazon forest with low-fertility soils.
Pierre Friedlingstein, Matthew W. Jones, Michael O'Sullivan, Robbie M. Andrew, Dorothee C. E. Bakker, Judith Hauck, Corinne Le Quéré, Glen P. Peters, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Rob B. Jackson, Simone R. Alin, Peter Anthoni, Nicholas R. Bates, Meike Becker, Nicolas Bellouin, Laurent Bopp, Thi Tuyet Trang Chau, Frédéric Chevallier, Louise P. Chini, Margot Cronin, Kim I. Currie, Bertrand Decharme, Laique M. Djeutchouang, Xinyu Dou, Wiley Evans, Richard A. Feely, Liang Feng, Thomas Gasser, Dennis Gilfillan, Thanos Gkritzalis, Giacomo Grassi, Luke Gregor, Nicolas Gruber, Özgür Gürses, Ian Harris, Richard A. Houghton, George C. Hurtt, Yosuke Iida, Tatiana Ilyina, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Atul Jain, Steve D. Jones, Etsushi Kato, Daniel Kennedy, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jürgen Knauer, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Arne Körtzinger, Peter Landschützer, Siv K. Lauvset, Nathalie Lefèvre, Sebastian Lienert, Junjie Liu, Gregg Marland, Patrick C. McGuire, Joe R. Melton, David R. Munro, Julia E. M. S. Nabel, Shin-Ichiro Nakaoka, Yosuke Niwa, Tsuneo Ono, Denis Pierrot, Benjamin Poulter, Gregor Rehder, Laure Resplandy, Eddy Robertson, Christian Rödenbeck, Thais M. Rosan, Jörg Schwinger, Clemens Schwingshackl, Roland Séférian, Adrienne J. Sutton, Colm Sweeney, Toste Tanhua, Pieter P. Tans, Hanqin Tian, Bronte Tilbrook, Francesco Tubiello, Guido R. van der Werf, Nicolas Vuichard, Chisato Wada, Rik Wanninkhof, Andrew J. Watson, David Willis, Andrew J. Wiltshire, Wenping Yuan, Chao Yue, Xu Yue, Sönke Zaehle, and Jiye Zeng
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 1917–2005, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1917-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1917-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
The Global Carbon Budget 2021 describes the data sets and methodology used to quantify the emissions of carbon dioxide and their partitioning among the atmosphere, land, and ocean. These living data are updated every year to provide the highest transparency and traceability in the reporting of CO2, the key driver of climate change.
Ruqi Yang, Jun Wang, Ning Zeng, Stephen Sitch, Wenhan Tang, Matthew Joseph McGrath, Qixiang Cai, Di Liu, Danica Lombardozzi, Hanqin Tian, Atul K. Jain, and Pengfei Han
Earth Syst. Dynam., 13, 833–849, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-13-833-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-13-833-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
We comprehensively investigate historical GPP trends based on five kinds of GPP datasets and analyze the causes for any discrepancies among them. Results show contrasting behaviors between modeled and satellite-based GPP trends, and their inconsistencies are likely caused by the contrasting performance between satellite-derived and modeled leaf area index (LAI). Thus, the uncertainty in satellite-based GPP induced by LAI undermines its role in assessing the performance of DGVM simulations.
Mathilda Hancock, Stephen Sitch, Fabian Jörg Fischer, Jérôme Chave, Michael O'Sullivan, Dominic Fawcett, and Lina María Mercado
Biogeosciences Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2022-87, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2022-87, 2022
Publication in BG not foreseen
Short summary
Short summary
Global vegetation models often underestimate the spatial variability of carbon stored in the Amazon forest. This paper demonstrates that including spatially varying tree mortality rates, as opposed to a homogeneous rate, in one model, significantly improves its simulations of the forest carbon store. To overcome the limited resolution of tree mortality data, this research presents a simple method of calculating mortality rates across Amazonia using a dependence on wood density.
Zhu Deng, Philippe Ciais, Zitely A. Tzompa-Sosa, Marielle Saunois, Chunjing Qiu, Chang Tan, Taochun Sun, Piyu Ke, Yanan Cui, Katsumasa Tanaka, Xin Lin, Rona L. Thompson, Hanqin Tian, Yuanzhi Yao, Yuanyuan Huang, Ronny Lauerwald, Atul K. Jain, Xiaoming Xu, Ana Bastos, Stephen Sitch, Paul I. Palmer, Thomas Lauvaux, Alexandre d'Aspremont, Clément Giron, Antoine Benoit, Benjamin Poulter, Jinfeng Chang, Ana Maria Roxana Petrescu, Steven J. Davis, Zhu Liu, Giacomo Grassi, Clément Albergel, Francesco N. Tubiello, Lucia Perugini, Wouter Peters, and Frédéric Chevallier
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 1639–1675, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1639-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1639-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
In support of the global stocktake of the Paris Agreement on climate change, we proposed a method for reconciling the results of global atmospheric inversions with data from UNFCCC national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs). Here, based on a new global harmonized database that we compiled from the UNFCCC NGHGIs and a comprehensive framework presented in this study to process the results of inversions, we compared their results of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O).
Willem Stefaan Conradie, Piotr Wolski, and Bruce Charles Hewitson
Adv. Stat. Clim. Meteorol. Oceanogr., 8, 63–81, https://doi.org/10.5194/ascmo-8-63-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/ascmo-8-63-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
The
Day Zerowater crisis affecting Cape Town after the severe 2015–2017 drought motivated renewed research interest into causes and projections of rainfall variability and change in this water-stressed region. Unusually few wet months and very wet days characterised the Day Zero Drought. Its extent expanded as it shifted gradually north-eastward, concurrent with changes in the weather systems driving drought. Our results emphasise the need to consider the interplay between drought drivers.
Willem Stefaan Conradie, Piotr Wolski, and Bruce Charles Hewitson
Adv. Stat. Clim. Meteorol. Oceanogr., 8, 31–62, https://doi.org/10.5194/ascmo-8-31-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/ascmo-8-31-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
Cape Town is situated in a small but ecologically and climatically highly diverse and vulnerable pocket of South Africa uniquely receiving its rain mostly in winter. We show complex structures in the spatial patterns of rainfall seasonality and year-to-year changes in rainfall within this domain, tied to spatial differences in the rain-bearing winds. This allows us to develop a new spatial subdivision of the region to help future studies distinguish spatially distinct climate change responses.
Benjamin Wild, Irene Teubner, Leander Moesinger, Ruxandra-Maria Zotta, Matthias Forkel, Robin van der Schalie, Stephen Sitch, and Wouter Dorigo
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 1063–1085, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1063-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1063-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
Gross primary production (GPP) describes the conversion of CO2 to carbohydrates and can be seen as a filter for our atmosphere of the primary greenhouse gas CO2. We developed VODCA2GPP, a GPP dataset that is based on vegetation optical depth from microwave remote sensing and temperature. Thus, it is mostly independent from existing GPP datasets and also available in regions with frequent cloud coverage. Analysis showed that VODCA2GPP is able to complement existing state-of-the-art GPP datasets.
Philippe Ciais, Ana Bastos, Frédéric Chevallier, Ronny Lauerwald, Ben Poulter, Josep G. Canadell, Gustaf Hugelius, Robert B. Jackson, Atul Jain, Matthew Jones, Masayuki Kondo, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Prabir K. Patra, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Ana Maria Roxana Petrescu, Shilong Piao, Chunjing Qiu, Celso Von Randow, Pierre Regnier, Marielle Saunois, Robert Scholes, Anatoly Shvidenko, Hanqin Tian, Hui Yang, Xuhui Wang, and Bo Zheng
Geosci. Model Dev., 15, 1289–1316, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-1289-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-1289-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
The second phase of the Regional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes (RECCAP) will provide updated quantification and process understanding of CO2, CH4, and N2O emissions and sinks for ten regions of the globe. In this paper, we give definitions, review different methods, and make recommendations for estimating different components of the total land–atmosphere carbon exchange for each region in a consistent and complete approach.
Keith B. Rodgers, Sun-Seon Lee, Nan Rosenbloom, Axel Timmermann, Gokhan Danabasoglu, Clara Deser, Jim Edwards, Ji-Eun Kim, Isla R. Simpson, Karl Stein, Malte F. Stuecker, Ryohei Yamaguchi, Tamás Bódai, Eui-Seok Chung, Lei Huang, Who M. Kim, Jean-François Lamarque, Danica L. Lombardozzi, William R. Wieder, and Stephen G. Yeager
Earth Syst. Dynam., 12, 1393–1411, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-1393-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-1393-2021, 2021
Short summary
Short summary
A large ensemble of simulations with 100 members has been conducted with the state-of-the-art CESM2 Earth system model, using historical and SSP3-7.0 forcing. Our main finding is that there are significant changes in the variance of the Earth system in response to anthropogenic forcing, with these changes spanning a broad range of variables important to impacts for human populations and ecosystems.
István Dunkl, Aaron Spring, Pierre Friedlingstein, and Victor Brovkin
Earth Syst. Dynam., 12, 1413–1426, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-1413-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-1413-2021, 2021
Short summary
Short summary
The variability in atmospheric CO2 is largely controlled by terrestrial carbon fluxes. These land–atmosphere fluxes are predictable for around 2 years, but the mechanisms providing the predictability are not well understood. By decomposing the predictability of carbon fluxes into individual contributors we were able to explain the spatial and seasonal patterns and the interannual variability of CO2 flux predictability.
Jan C. Minx, William F. Lamb, Robbie M. Andrew, Josep G. Canadell, Monica Crippa, Niklas Döbbeling, Piers M. Forster, Diego Guizzardi, Jos Olivier, Glen P. Peters, Julia Pongratz, Andy Reisinger, Matthew Rigby, Marielle Saunois, Steven J. Smith, Efisio Solazzo, and Hanqin Tian
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 5213–5252, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-5213-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-5213-2021, 2021
Short summary
Short summary
We provide a synthetic dataset on anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for 1970–2018 with a fast-track extension to 2019. We show that GHG emissions continued to rise across all gases and sectors. Annual average GHG emissions growth slowed, but absolute decadal increases have never been higher in human history. We identify a number of data gaps and data quality issues in global inventories and highlight their importance for monitoring progress towards international climate goals.
Lina Teckentrup, Martin G. De Kauwe, Andrew J. Pitman, Daniel S. Goll, Vanessa Haverd, Atul K. Jain, Emilie Joetzjer, Etsushi Kato, Sebastian Lienert, Danica Lombardozzi, Patrick C. McGuire, Joe R. Melton, Julia E. M. S. Nabel, Julia Pongratz, Stephen Sitch, Anthony P. Walker, and Sönke Zaehle
Biogeosciences, 18, 5639–5668, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-5639-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-5639-2021, 2021
Short summary
Short summary
The Australian continent is included in global assessments of the carbon cycle such as the global carbon budget, yet the performance of dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) over Australia has rarely been evaluated. We assessed simulations by an ensemble of dynamic global vegetation models over Australia and highlighted a number of key areas that lead to model divergence on both short (inter-annual) and long (decadal) timescales.
Ana Bastos, René Orth, Markus Reichstein, Philippe Ciais, Nicolas Viovy, Sönke Zaehle, Peter Anthoni, Almut Arneth, Pierre Gentine, Emilie Joetzjer, Sebastian Lienert, Tammas Loughran, Patrick C. McGuire, Sungmin O, Julia Pongratz, and Stephen Sitch
Earth Syst. Dynam., 12, 1015–1035, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-1015-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-12-1015-2021, 2021
Short summary
Short summary
Temperate biomes in Europe are not prone to recurrent dry and hot conditions in summer. However, these conditions may become more frequent in the coming decades. Because stress conditions can leave legacies for many years, this may result in reduced ecosystem resilience under recurrent stress. We assess vegetation vulnerability to the hot and dry summers in 2018 and 2019 in Europe and find the important role of inter-annual legacy effects from 2018 in modulating the impacts of the 2019 event.
Cited articles
Allen, C. D., Macalady, A. K., Chenchouni, H., Bachelet, D., McDowell, N.,
Vennetier, M., and Gonzalez, P.: A global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality reveals emerging climate change risks for forests, Forest Ecol. Manage., 259, 660–684, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2009.09.001, 2010.
Ahlström, A., Raupach, M. R., Schurgers, G., Smith, B., Arneth, A., Jung,
M., Reichstein, M., Canadell, J. G., Friedlingstein, P., Jain, A. K., Kato, E., Poulter, B., Sitch, S., Stocker, B. D., Viovy, N., Wang, Y. P., Wiltshire, A., Zaehle, S., and Zeng, N.: The dominant role of semi-arid ecosystems in the trend and variability of the land CO2 sink, Science, 348, 895–899, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa1668, 2015.
Andela, N., Liu, Y. Y., van Dijk, A. I. J. M., de Jeu, R. A. M., and McVicar, T. R.: Global changes in dryland vegetation dynamics (1988–2008) assessed by satellite remote sensing: Comparing a new passive microwave vegetation density record with reflective greenness data, Biogeosciences, 10, 6657–6676, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-10-6657-2013, 2013.
Anyamba, A., Justice, C. O., Tucker, C. J., and Mahoney, R.: Seasonal to
interannual variability of Vegetation and fires at SAFARI 2000 sites inferred from advanced very high resolution Radiometer time series data, J. Geophys. Res., 10, 8507, https://doi.org/10.1029/2002JD002464, 2003.
Beguería, S., Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Reig, F., and Latorre, B.:
Standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) revisited: parameter fitting, evapotranspiration models, tools, datasets and drought
monitoring, Int. J. Climatol., 34, 3001–3023, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.3887, 2014.
Bonan, G. B., Oleson, K. W., Vertenstein, M., Lewis, S., Zeng, X., Dai, Y.,
Dickinson, D. E., and Yang, Z.: The land surface climatology of the NCAR land surface model coupled to the NCAR community climate model, J. Climate, 11, 1307–1327, 2002.
Cai, W., Borlace, S., Lengaigne, M., van Rensch, P., Collins, M., Vecchi,
G., Timmermann, A., Santoso, A., McPhaden, M. J., Wu, M., England, L. H., Wang, G., Guilyardi, E., and Jin, F.-F: Increasing frequency of extreme El Nino events due to greenhouse warming, Nat. Clim. Change, 4, 111–116, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2100, 2014.
Chapotin, S. M., Razanameharizaka, J. H., and Holbrook, N. M.: Water relations of baobab trees (Adansonia spp L.) during the rainy season. Does stem water buffer daily water deficit, Plant Cell Enviro., 29, 1021–1032, 2006.
Clark, D. B., Mercado, L. M., Sitch, S., Jones, C. D., Gedney, N., Best, M.
J., Pryor, M., Rooney, G. G., Essery, R. L. H., Blyth, E., Boucher, O., Harding, R. J., Huntingford, C., and Cox, P. M.: The Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), model description – Part 2: Carbon fluxes and vegetation dynamics, Geosci. Model Dev., 4, 701–722, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-4-701-2011, 2011.
Corlett, R. T.: The Impacts of Droughts in Tropical Forests, Trends Plant Sci., 21, 584–593, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2016.02.003, 2016.
Dahlin, K. M., Fisher, R. A., and Lawrence, P. J.: Environmental drivers of
drought deciduous phenology in the Community Land Model, Biogeosciences, 12, 5061–5074, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-12-5061-2015, 2015.
Dahlin, K. M., Akanga, D., Lombardozzi, D. L., Reed, D. E., Shirkey, G., Lei, C., Abraha, M., and Chen, J.: Challenging a global land surface model in a local socio-environmental system, Land, 9, 1–21, https://doi.org/10.3390/land9100398, 2020.
Dai, A.: Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models, Nat. Clim. Change, 3, 52–58, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1633, 2013.
DEA – Department of Environmental Affairs: Climate Change Adaptation Plans
for South African Biomes, edited by: Kharika, J. R. M., Mkhize, N. C. S., Munyai, T., Khavhagali, V. P., Davis, C., Dziba, D., Scholes, R., van Garderen, E., von Maltitz, G., Le Maitre, D., Archibald, S., Lotter, D., van Deventer, H., Midgely, G., and Hoffman, T., DEA, Pretoria, 2015.
D'Onofrio, D., Baudena, M., Lasslop, G., Nieradzik, L. P., Wårlind, D.,
and von Hardenberg, J.: Linking vegetation-climate-fire relationships in subsaharan africa to key ecological processes in two dynamic global vegetation models, Front. Environ. Sci., 8, 136, https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2020.00136, 2020.
Donohue, R. J., McVicar, T. R., and Roderick, M. L.: Climate-related trends
in Australian vegetation cover as inferred from satellite observations, 1981–2006, Global Change Biol., 15, 1025–1039, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2008.01746.x, 2009.
Driver, A., Sink, K. J., Nel, J. N., Holness, S., Van Niekerk, L., Daniels, F., Jonas, Z., Majiedt, P. A., Harris, L., and Maze, K.: National Biodiversity Assessment 2011: An assessment of South Africa's biodiversity and ecosystems, Synthesis Report, South African National Biodiversity Institute and Department of Environmental Affairs, Pretoria, 2012.
Dupont, L. M.: Late Pliocene vegetation and Climate and Namibia (Southern
Africa) derived From Palynology of ODP site 1082, Geochem. Geophy. Geosy., 7, Q05007, https://doi.org/10.1029/2005GC001208, 2006.
El-Vilaly, M. A. S., Didan, K., Marsh, S. E., van Leeuwen, W. J., Crimmins,
M. A., and Munoz, A. B.: Vegetation productivity responses to drought on tribal lands in the four corners region of the Southwest USA, Front. Earth Sci., 12, 37–51, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11707-017-0646-z, 2017.
Fan, L., Gao, Y., Brück, H., and Bernhofer, C.: Investigating the
relationship between NDVI and LAI in semi-arid grassland in Inner Mongolia using in-situ measurements, Theor. Appl. Climatol., 95, 151–156, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-007-0369-2, 2008.
Fan, L., Wigneron, J. P., Ciais, P., Chave, J., Brandt, M., Fensholt, R., Saatchi, S. S., Bastos, A., Al-Yaari, A., Hufkens, K., Qin, Y., Xiao, X., Chen, C., Myneni, R. B., Fernandez-Moran, R., Mialon, A., Rodriguez-Fernandez, N. J., Kerr, Y., Tian, F., and Peñuelas, J.: Satellite observed pantropical carbon dynamics, Nat. Plants, 5, 944–951, 2019.
FAO: FAO/ESAF Handbook for Defining and Setting up a Food Security Information and Early Warning System (FSIEWS), FAO, Rome, 2000b.
Fayyad, U., Piatetsky-Shapiro, G., and Smyth, P. (Eds): From data mining to
knowledge discovery Databases, AI Magazine, 17, 37, 1996.
Fekete, B. M., Vörösmarty, C. J.,Roads, J. O., and Willmott, C. J.: Uncertainties in precipitation and their impacts on runoff estimates, J. Climate, 17, 294–304, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(2004)017<0294:UIPATI>2.0.CO;2, 2004.
Fensholt, R., Langanke, T., Rasmussen, K., Reenberg, A., Prince, S. D., Tucker, C., Scholes, R. J., Le, Q. B., Bondeau, A., Eastman, R., Epstein, H., Gaughan, A. E., Hellden, U., Mbow, C., Olsson, L., Paruelo, J., Schweitzer, C., Seaquist, J., and Wessels, K.: Greenness in semi-arid areas across the globe 1981–2007 – an Earth Observing Satellite based analysis of trends and drivers, Remote Sens. Environ., 121, 144–158, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2012.01.017, 2012.
Forkel, M., Carvalhais, N., Verbesselt, J., Mahecha, M. D., Neigh, C. S. R., and Reichstein, M.: Trend Change Detection in NDVI Time Series: Effects of Inter-Annual Variability and Methodology, Remote Sens., 5, 2113–2144,
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs5052113: 2013.
Fuller, D. O. and Prince, S. D.: Rainfall and foliar dynamics in tropical
southern Africa: Potential impacts of global climatic change on savanna vegetation, Climatic Change, 33, 69–96, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00140514, 1996.
Gielen, B., De Boeck, H, Lemmens, C. M. H. M., Valcke, R., Nijs, I., and Ceulemans, R.: Grassland species will not necessarily benefit from future elevated air temperatures: a chlorophyll fluorescence approach to study autumn physiology, Physiol. Plant, 125, 52–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1399-3054.2005.00539.x, 2005.
Gitelson, A. A.: Wide dynamic range vegetation index for remote quantification of biophysical characteristics of vegetation, J. Plant Physiol., 161, 165–173, https://doi.org/10.1078/0176-1617-01176, 2004.
Goll, D. S., Vuichard, N., Maignan, F., Jornet-Puig, A., Sardans, J.,
Violette, A., Peng, S., Sun, Y., Kvakic, M., Guimberteau, M., Guenet, B., Zaehle, S., Penuelas, J., Janssens, I., and Ciais, P.: A representation of the phosphorus cycle for ORCHIDEE, Geosci. Model Dev., 10, 3745–3770,
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-3745-2017, 2017.
Greve, P., Orlowsky, B. Mueller, J. Sheffield, M. Reichstein, and Seneviratne, S. I.: Global assessment of trends in wetting and drying over
land, Nat. Geosci., 7, 716–721, https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2247, 2014.
Hao, Z. and AghaKouchak, A.: Multivariate standardized drought index: a
parametric multi-index model, Adv. Water Resour., 57, 12–18,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2013.03.009, 2013.
Harris, I., Jones, P. D., Osborn, T. J., and Lister, D. H.: Updated
high-resolution grids of monthly climatic observations – the CRU TS3.10 Dataset, Int. J. Climatol., 34, 623–642, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.3711, 2014.
Harris, I., Osborn, T. J., Jones, P., and Lister, D.: Version 4 of the CRU TS monthly high-resolution gridded multivariate climate dataset, Scient. Data, 7, 109, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0453-3, 2020.
Haverd, V., Smith, B., Nieradzik, L., Briggs, P. R., Woodgate, W., Trudinger, C. M., Canadell, J. G., and Cuntz, M.: A new version of the CABLE land surface model (Subversion revision r4601) incorporating land use and land cover change, woody vegetation demography, and a novel optimisation-based approach to plant coordination of photosynthesis, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 2995–3026, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2995-2018, 2018.
Hoffman, M. T., Carrick, P. J., and West, A. G.: Drought, climate change and
vegetation response in the succulent karoo, South Africa, S. Afr. J. Sci., 105, 61–68, https://doi.org/10.4102/sajs.v105i1/2.40, 2009.
Joetzjer, E., Delire, C., Douville, H., Ciais, P., Decharme, B., Carrer, D.,
Verbeeck, H., De Weirdt, M., and Bonal, D.: Improving the ISBACC land surface model simulation of water and carbon fluxes and stocks over the Amazon forest, Geosci. Model Dev., 8, 1709–1727, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-8-1709-2015, 2015.
Kato, E., Kinoshita, T., Ito, A., Kawamiya, M., and Yamagata, Y.: Evaluation
of spatially explicit emission scenario of landuse change and biomass burning using a process-based biogeochemical model, J. Land Use Sci., 8, 104–122, https://doi.org/10.1080/1747423X.2011.628705, 2013.
Khosravi, H., Haydari, E., Shekoohizadegan, S., and Zareie, S.: Assessment
the effect of drought on vegetation in desert area using landsat data Egypt, J. Remote Sens. Space Sci., 2007, S3–S12, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrs.2016.11.007, 2017.
Kim, J. B., Kerns, B. K., Drapek, R. J., Pitts, G. S., and Halofsky, J. E.: Simulating vegetation response to climate change in the Blue Mountains with MC2 dynamic global vegetation model, Clim. Serv., 10, 20–32, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cliser.2018.04.001, 2018.
Kwon, M., Kwon, H. H., and Han, D.: Spatio-temporal drought patterns of multiple drought indices based on precipitation and soil moisture: a case study in South Korea, Int. J. Climatol., 39, 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.6094, 2019.
Lange, C. B., Berger, W. H., Lin, H.-L., Wefer, G., and Shipboard Scientific Party Leg 175: The early Matuyama diatom maximum off SW Africa, Benguela current system (ODP Leg 175), Mar. Geol., 161, 93–114,
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0025-3227(99)00081-X, 1999.
Lawal, S., Lennard, C., Jack, C., Wolski, P., Hewitsin, B., and Abiodun, B.: The observed and model-simulated response of southern African vegetation to drought, Agr. Forest Meteorol., 279, 107698, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2019.107698, 2019a.
Lawal, S., Lennard, C., and Hewitson, B.: Response of southern African vegetation to climate change at 1.5 and 2.0 degrees global warming above the pre-industrial level, Clim. Serv., 16, 100134, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cliser.2019.100134, 2019b.
Lawal, S. A.: The response of southern African vegetation to drought in past
and future climate, PhD Thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, 2018.
Le Quéré, C., Peters, G. P., Andres, R. J., Andrew, R. M., Boden, T.
A., Ciais, P., Friedlingstein, P., Houghton, R. A., Marland, G., Moriarty, R., Sitch, S., Tans, P., Arneth, A., Arvanitis, A., Bakker, D. C. E., Bopp, L., Canadell, J. G., Chini, L. P., Doney, S. C., Harper, A., Harris, I., House, J. I., Jain, A. K., Jones, S. D., Kato, E., Keeling, R. F., Klein Goldewijk, K., Körtzinger, A., Koven, C., Lefèvre, N., Maignan, F., Omar, A., Ono, T., Park, G.-H., Pfeil, B., Poulter, B., Raupach, M. R., Regnier, P., Rödenbeck, C., Saito, S., Schwinger, J., Segschneider, J., Stocker, B. D., Takahashi, T., Tilbrook, B., van Heuven, S., Viovy, N., Wanninkhof, R., Wiltshire, A., and Zaehle, S.: Global carbon budget 2013, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 6, 235–263, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-6-235-2014, 2014.
Lienert, S. and Joos, F.: A Bayesian ensemble data assimilation to constrain model parameters and land-use carbon emissions, Biogeosciences, 15, 2909–2930, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-15-2909-2018, 2018.
Lu, E., Luo, Y., Zhang, R., Wu, Q., and Liu, L.: Regional atmospheric
anomalies responsible for the 2009–2010 severe drought in China, J. Geophys. Res., 116, D21114, https://doi.org/10.1029/2011JD015706, 2011.
Mango, L. M., Melesse, A. M., McClain, M. E., Gann, D., and Setegn, S. G.: Land use and climate change impacts on the hydrology of the upper Mara River Basin, Kenya: results of a modeling study to support better resource management, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 15, 2245–2258, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-15-2245-2011, 2011.
Mao, J. and Yan, B.: Global Monthly Mean Leaf Area Index Climatology, 1981–2015, ORNL DAAC [data set], Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1653, 2019.
Masih, I., Uhlenbrook, S., Maskey, S., and Smakhtin, V.: Stream-flow trends
and climate linkages in the Zagros Mountain, Iran, Climatic Change, 104, 317–338, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-009-9793-x, 2014.
McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., and Kleist, J.: The relationship of drought
frequency and duration to time scales, in: Proc. Eight Conf. on Applied Climatology, Amer. Meteor. Soc., Anaheim, CA, 179–184, 1993.
Melillo, J.: Climate change, risky business, and a call to action for
ecologists, Ecosyst. Health Sustainabil., 1, 36, https://doi.org/10.1890/EHS14-0016.1, 2015.
Melton, J. R. and Arora, V. K.: Competition between plant functional types
in the Canadian Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (CTEM) v. 2.0, Geosci. Model Dev., 9, 323–361, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-323-2016, 2016.
Mitchell, T. D. and Jones, P. D.: An improved method of constructing a database of monthly climate observations and associated high-resolution grids, Int. J. Climatol., 25, 693–712, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.1181, 2005.
Mitchell, T. M.: Machine learning, in: McGraw-Hill Series in Computer Science, McGraw-Hill, Boston, MA, 1997.
Moore, B., Crowell, S. M. R., Rayner, P. J., Kumer, J., O'Dell, C. W., O'Brien, D., Utembe, S., Polonsky, I., Schimel, D., and Lemen, J.: The potential of the geostationary carbon cycle observatory (GeoCarb) to provide multi-scale constraints on the carbon cycle in the Americas, Front. Environ. Sci., 6, 109, https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2018.00109, 2018.
Mukherjee, N., Zabala, A., Huge, J., Nyumba, T. O., Esmail, B. A., and Sutherland, W. J.: Comparison of techniques for eliciting views and judgements in decision-making, Meth. Ecol. Evol., 9, 54– 63, https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12940, 2017.
Müller, C., Cramer, W., Hare, W. L., and Lotze-Campen, H.: Climate change risks for African agriculture, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 108, 4313–4315,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1015078108, 2011.
Murray, S. J., Foster, P. N., and Prentice, I. C.: Evaluation of global
continental hydrology as simulated by the Land-surface Processes and eXchanges Dynamic Global Vegetation Model, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 15, 91–105, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-15-91-2011, 2011.
Myoung, B., Choi, Y.-S., Hong, S., and Park, S. K.: Inter- and intra-annual
variability of vegetation in the northern hemisphere and its association with precursory meteorological factors, Global Biogeochem. Cy., 27, 31–42, https://doi.org/10.1002/gbc.20017, 2013.
Naik, M. and Abiodun, B. J.: Potential impacts of forestation on future
climate change in Southern Africa, Int. J. Climatol., 36, 4560–4576, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4652, 2016.
Naumann, G., Alfieri, L., Wyser, K., Mentaschi, L., Betts, R. A., Carrao, H.,
Spinoni, J., Vogt, J., and Feyen, L.: Global changes in drought conditions under different levels of warming, Geophys. Res. Lett., 45, 3285–3296,
https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076521, 2018.
New, M.: Are semi-arid regions climate change hot-spots? Evidence from
Southern Africa, African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) blog, 2015.
New, M., Hulme, M., and Jones, P. D.: Representing twentieth century space-time climate variability. II: development of 1901–1996 monthly grids of terrestrial surface climate, J. Climate, 13, 2217–2238, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442(2000)013<2217:RTCSTC>2.0.CO;2, 2000.
Oleson, K., Lawrence, D., Bonan, G., Drewniak, B., Huang, M., Koven, C.,
Levis, S., Li, F., Riley, W., Subin, Z., Swenson, S., Thornton, P., Bozbiyik, A., Fisher, R., Heald, C., Kluzek, E., Lamarque, J., Lawrence, P., Leung, L., Lipscomb, W., Muszala, S., Ricciuto, D., Sacks, W., Tang, J., and Yang, Z.: Technical Description of version 4.5 of the Community Land Model (CLM), NCAR [model and code],
http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/cesm1.2/clm/CLM45_Tech_Note.pdf (last access: May 2018), 2013.
Otto, F. E. L., Wolski, P., Lehner, F., Tebaldi, C., van Oldenborgh, G. J., Higesteeger, S., Singh, R., Holden, P., Fučkar, N. S., Odoulami, R., and New, M.: Anthropogenic influence on the drivers of the Western Cape drought 2015–2017, Environ. Res. Lett., 13, 24010, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aae9f9, 2018.
Palmer, W. C.: Keeping track of crop moisture conditions, nationwide: the new
Crop Moisture Index, Weatherwise, 21, 156–161, https://doi.org/10.1080/00431672.1968.9932814, 1965.
Pan, S., Dangal, S. R. S., Tao, B., Yang, J., and Tian. H..: Recent patterns of terrestrial net primary production in Africa influenced by multiple environmental changes, Ecosyst. Health Sustainabil., 1, 18, https://doi.org/10.1890/EHS14-0027.1, 2015.
Piao, S., Friedlingstein, P., Ciais, P., de Noblet-Ducoudre, N., Labat, D.,
and Zaehle, S.: Changes in climate and land use have a larger direct impact than rising CO2 on global river runoff trends, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 104, 15242–15247, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707213104, 2007.
Pinzon, J. E. and Tucker, C. J.: A Non-Stationary 1981–2012 AVHRR NDVI3g
Time Series, Remote Sens., 6, 6929–6960, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs6086929, 2014.
Potithep, S., Nasahara, N., Muraoka, H., Nagai, S., and Suzuki, R.: What is
the actual relationship between LAI and VI in a deciduous broadleaf forest, International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Science, 38, 609–614, 2010.
Potter, C. S. and Klooster, S. A.: Dynamic global vegetation modelling for
prediction of plant types and biogenic trace gas fluxes, Global Ecol. Biogeogr., 8, 473–488, https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2699.1999.00152.x, 1998.
Poulter, B., Frank, D., Ciais, P., Myneni, R. B., Andela, N., Broquet, G. J. B., Canadell, J. G., Chevallier, F., Liu, Y. Y., Running, S. W., Sitch, S., and van der Werf, G. R.: Contribution of semi-arid ecosystems to interannual variability of the global carbon cycle, Nature, 509, 600–603, 2014.
Rahimzadeh-Bajgiran, P., Omasa, K., and Shimizu, Y.: Comparative evaluation
of the Vegetation Dryness Index (VDI), the Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) and the improved TVDI (iTVDI) for water stress detection in semi-arid regions of Iran, ISPRS J. Photogram. Remote Sens., 68, 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2011.10.009, 2012.
Reuter, M., Bösch, H., Bovensmann, H., Bril, A., Buchwitz, M., Butz, A.,
Burrows, J. P., O'Dell, C. W., Guerlet, S., Hasekamp, O., Heymann, J., Kikuchi, N., Oshchepkov, S., Parker, R., Pfeifer, S., Schneising, O., Yokota, T., and Yoshida, Y.: A joint effort to deliver satellite retrieved atmospheric CO2 concentrations for surface flux inversions: the ensemble median algorithm EMMA, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 13, 1771–1780, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-13-1771-2013, 2013.
Rezaei, M., Sameni, A., Shamsi, S. R. F., and Bartholomeus, H.: Remote sensing of land use/cover changes and its effect on wind erosion potential in southern Iran, Peer J., 4, e1948, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1948, 2016.
Romps, D. M., Seeley, J. T., Vollaro, D., and Molinari, J.: Projected increase in lightning strikes in the United States due to global warming, Science,, 346, 851–854, 2014.
Running, S. W. and Coughlan, J. C.: A general model of forest ecosystem
processes for regional applications, Ecol. Model., 42, 124–154,
https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3800(88)90112-3, 1988.
Santin-Janin, H., Garel, M., Chapuis, J.-L., and Pontier, D.: Assessing the
performance of NDVI as a proxy for plant biomass using non-linear models: a case study on the Kerguelen archipelago, Polar Biol., 32, 861–871, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-009-0586-5, 2009.
Schaefer, K., Schwalm, C. R., Williams, C., Arain, M. A., Barr, A., Chen, J. M., Davis, K. J., Dimitrov, D., Hilton, T. W., Hollinger, D. Y., Humphreys, E., Poulter, B., Raczka, B. M., Richardson, A. D., Sahoo, A., Thornton, P., Vargas, R., Verbeeck, H., Anderson, R., Baker, I., Black, T. A., Bolstad, P., Chen, J., Curtis, P. S., Desai, A. R., Dietze, M., Dragoni, D., Gough, C., Grant, R. F., Gu, L., Jain, A., Kucharik, C., Law, B., Liu, S., Lokipitiya, E., Margolis, H. A., Matamala, R., McCaughey, R. H., Monson, R., Munger, J. W., Oechel, W., Peng, C., Price, D. T., Ricciuto, D., Riley, W. J., Roulet, N., Tian, H., Tonitto, C., Torn, M., Weng, E., and Zhou X.: A model-data comparison of gross primary productivity: Results from the North American Carbon Program site synthesis, J. Geophys. Res., 117, G03010, https://doi.org/10.1029/2012JG001960, 2012.
Schwinning, S., Starr, B. I., and Ehleringer, J. R.: Summer and winter drought in a cold desert ecosystem (Colorado Plateau) part II: effects on plant carbon assimilation and growth, J. Arid Environ., 61, 61–78, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaridenv.2004.07.013, 2005.
Sinclair, R. E. A. and Beyers, R. L.: African Biomes, Ecology, 61, 61–78, 2015.
Sellers, P. J., Randall, D. A., Collatz, G. J., Berry, J. A., Field, C. B.,
Dazlich, D. A., Zhang, C., and Collelo, G. D., and Bounuoa, L.: A revised land surface parameterization (SIB2) for Atmospheric GCMs: Part I. Model formulation, J. Climate, 9, 676–705, https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0442, 1996.
Sitch, S., Huntingford, C., Gedney, N., Levy, P. E., Lomas, M., Piao, S. L., Betts, R., Ciais, P., Cox, P., Friedlingstein, P., Jones, C. D., Prentice, I. C., and Woodward, F. I.: Evaluation of the terrestrial carbon cycle, future plant geography and climate-carbon cycle feedbacks using five Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs), Global Change Biol., 14, 2015–2039, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2008.01626.x, 2008.
Stagge, J. H., Tallaksen, L. M., Gudmundsson, L., van Looon, A. F., and Stahl, K.: Pan-European comparison of candidate distributions for climatological drought indices (SPI and SPEI) Hydrology in a Changing World: Environmental and Human Dimensions, in: Proceedings of FRIEND-Water 2014, October 2014, Montpellier, France, 15, EGU2013-9329, 2014.
Stewart, I. T., Cayan, D. R., and Dettinger, M. D.: Changes in snowmelt runoff timing in western North America under a `business as usual' climate change scenario, Climatic Change, 62, 217–232, https://doi.org/10.1023/B:CLIM.0000013702.22656.e8, 2004.
Street, R. A. and Prinsloo, G.: Commercially Important Medicinal Plants
of South Africa: A Review, J. Chem., 2013, 205048, https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/205048, 2013.
Sultan, B. and Gaetani, M.: Agriculture in West Africa in the twenty-first
century: Climate change and impacts scenarios, and potential for adaptation, Front. Plant Sci., 7, 1–20, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2016.01262, 2016.
Teuling, A. J., van Loon, A., Seneviratne, S., Lehner, M., Aubinet, M., Heinesch, B., Bernhofer, C., Grunwald, T., Prasse, H., and Spank, U.: Spank Evapotranspiration amplifies European summer drought, Geophys. Res. Lett., 40, 2071–2075, https://doi.org/10.1002/grl.50495, 2013.
Thonicke, K., Venevsky, S., Sitch, S., and Cramer, W.: The role of fire
disturbance for global vegetation dynamics: coupling fire into a Dynamic Global Vegetation Model, Global Ecol. Biogeogr., 10, 661–677, 2001.
Tian, F., Brandt, M., Liu, Y. Y., Rasmussen, K., and Fensholt, R.: Mapping
gains and losses in woody vegetation across global tropical drylands, Global Change Biol., 23, 1748–1760, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13464, 2017.
Tian, H. Q., Chen, G. S., Lu, C. Q., Xu, X. F., Hayes, D. J., Ren, W., Pan,
S. F., Huntzinger, D. N., and Wofsy, S. C.: North American terrestrial CO2 uptake largely offset by CH4 and N2O emissions: toward a full accounting of the greenhouse gas budget, Climatic Change, 129, 413–426, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1072-9, 2015.
Towers, P. C., Strever, A., and Poblete-Echeverría, C.: Comparison of Vegetation Indices for Leaf Area Index Estimation in Vertical Shoot Positioned Vine Canopies with and without Grenbiule Hail-Protection Netting, Remote Sens., 11, 1073, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11091073, 2019.
Transtrum, M. K. and Qiu, P.: Bridging mechanistic and phenomenological models of complex biological systems, PLoS Comput. Biol., 12, e1004,
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004915, 2016.
Trenberth, K. E., A. Dai, A., van der Schrier, G., Jones, P. D., Barichivich, J., Briffa, K. R., and Sheffield, J.: Global warming and changes in drought, Nat. Clim. Change, 4, 17–22, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2067, 2014.
Ujeneza, E. and Abiodun, B. J.: Drought regimes in Southern Africa and how
well GCMs simulate them?, Clim. Dynam., 44, 1595–1609, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2325-z, 2014.
Ujeneza, E. L.: Simulating the Characteristics of Droughts in Southern Africa, MS Thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014.
UNEP – United Nations Environmental Protection: Atlas of changing environment, Biomes of Africa, UNEP, Nairobi, Kenya, 2008.
Vicente-Serrano, S. M.: Spatial and temporal evolution of precipitation
droughts in Spain in the last century, in: Adverse Weather in Spain, edited by: Martínez, C. C.-L. and Rodríguez, F. V., Consorcio de
Compensación de Seguros, Madrid, Spain, 283– 296, ISBN 9788496709430, 2013.
Vicente-Serrano, S. M. and López-Moreno, J. I.: The influence of
atmospheric circulation at different spatial scales on winter drought variability through a semi-arid climatic gradient in northeast Spain, Int. J. Climatol., 26, 1427–1453, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.1387, 2006.
Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Beguería, S., López-Moreno, J, I., Angulo, M., and El Kenawy, A.: A new global 0.5∘ gridded dataset (1901–2006) of a multiscalar drought index: comparison with current drought index datasets based on the Palmer Drought Severity Index, J. Hydrometeorol., 11, 1033–1043, https://doi.org/10.1175/2010JHM1224.1, 2010.
Vicente-Serrnao, S. M., Gouvelia, C., Camarero, J. J,, Begueria, S., Trigo, R., Lopez-Moreno, J. I., Azorin-Molina, A., Pasho, E., Lorenzo-Lacruz, J., Revuelto, J., Moran-Tejeda, E., and Sanchez-Lorezo, A.: Response of vegetation to drought time-scales across global land biomes, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 110, 52–57, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1207068110, 2012.
Vicente-Serrano, S. M. and National Center for Atmospheric Research Staff (Eds).: The Climate Data Guide: Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/standardized-precipitation-evapotranspiration-index-spei
(last access: January 2020), 2015.
Wang, A, Li, K. Y., and Lettenmailer, D. P.: Integration of the Variable
Infiltration Capacity Model Soil hydrology scheme into the Community Land Model, Clim. Dynam., 113, D09111, https://doi.org/10.1029/2007JD009246, 2008.
Wang, Q., Tenhunen, J., Dinh, N. Q., Reichstein, M., Vesala, T., and Keronen,
P.: Similarities in ground- and satellite-based ndvi time series and their relationship to physiological activity of a Scots pine forest in Finland, Remote Sens. Environ., 93, 225–237, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2004.07.006, 2004.
Wang, S.: Three characteristics of meteorological drought in southwest
china, China Meteorol. News, 3, 3–4, 2010.
Wang, X., Piao, S., Ciais, P., Friedlingstein, P., Myneni, R. B., Cox, P., Heimann, M., Miller, J., Peng, S., Wang, T., Yang, H., and Chen, A.: A two-fold increase of carbon cycle sensitivity to tropical temperature variations, Nature, 506, 212–215, 2014.
Ward, J. D., Seely, M. K., and Lancaster, N.: On the antiquity of the Namib, S. Afr. J. Sci., 79, 175–183, 1983.
Wilhite, D. A. and Glantz, M. H.: Understanding the drought phenomenon: the
role of definitions, Water Int., 10, 111–120, https://doi.org/10.1080/02508068508686328, 1985.
WWF:
http://www.wwf.org.za/what_we_do/land/grasslands/grasslands_ecosystems_services/
(last access: 17 May 2018), 2001.
Xu, K., Yang, D., Yang, H., Li, Z., Qin, Y., and Shen, Y.: Spatio-temporal
variation of drought in China during 1961–2012: a climatic perspective, J. Hydrol., 526, 253–264, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.09.047, 2015.
Xue, J. and Su, B.: Significant remote sensing vegetation indices: a review
of developments and applications, J. Sens., 2017, 1353691, https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/1353691, 2017.
Yang, H., Piao, S., Zeng, Z., Ciais, P., Yin, Y., Friedlingstein, P., Sitch,
S., Ahlström, A., Guimberteau, M., Huntingford, C., Levis, S., Levy, P. E., Huang, M., Li, Y., Li, X., Lomas, M. R., Peylin, P., Poulter, B., Viovy, N., Zaehle, S., Zeng, N., Zhao, F., and Wang, L.: Multicriteria evaluation of discharge simulation in Dynamic Global Vegetation Models, J. Geophys. Res.-Atmos., 120, 7488–7505, https://doi.org/10.1002/2015JD023129, 2015.
Yin, Y., Byrne, B., Liu, J., Wennberg, P., Davis, K. J., Magney, T., Kohler, P., He., L., Jeyaram, R., Humphrey, V., Gerken, T., Feng, S., Digangi, J. P., and Frankenberg, C.: Cropland carbon uptake delayed and reduced by 2019 Midwest floods, AGU Advances, 1, e2019AV000140, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019AV000140, 2020.
Zaehle, S., Ciais, P., Friend, A. D., and Prieur, V.: Carbon benefits of
anthropogenic reactive nitrogen offset by nitrous oxide emissions, Nat. Geosci., 4, 601–605, https://doi.org/10.1038/NGEO1207, 2011.
Zeppel, M. J. B., Wilks, J. V., and Lewis, J. D.: Impacts of extreme precipitation and seasonal changes in precipitation on plants, Biogeosciences, 11, 3083–3093, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-11-3083-2014, 2014.
Zhang, L., Xiao, J., Li, J., Wang, K., Lei, L., and Guo, H.: The 2010 spring drought reduced primary productivity in southwestern China, Environ. Res. Lett., 7, 045706, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/045706, 2012.
Zhao, C., Deng, X., Yuan, Y., Yan, H., and Liang, H.: Prediction of drought
risk based on the WRF model in yunnan province of China, Adv. Meteorol., 2013, 295856, https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/295856, 2013.
Zhu, X. and Liu, D.: Improving forest aboveground biomass estimation using seasonal Landsat NDVI time-series, ISPRS J. Photogram. Remote Sens., 102, 222–231, 2015.
Short summary
To investigate the impacts of drought on vegetation, which few studies have done due to various limitations, we used the leaf area index as proxy and dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) to simulate drought impacts because the models use observationally derived climate. We found that the semi-desert biome responds strongly to drought in the summer season, while the tropical forest biome shows a weak response. This study could help target areas to improve drought monitoring and simulation.
To investigate the impacts of drought on vegetation, which few studies have done due to various...
