I. Pison

Three decades of global methane sources and sinks

Methane is an important greenhouse gas, responsible for about 20% of the warming induced by long-lived greenhouse gases since pre-industrial times. By reacting with hydroxyl radicals, methane reduces the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere and generates ozone in the troposphere. Although most sources and sinks of methane have been identified, their relative contributions to atmospheric methane levels are highly uncertain. As such, the factors responsible for the observed stabilization of atmospheric methane levels in the early 2000s, and the renewed rise after 2006, remain unclear. Here, we construct decadal budgets for methane sources and sinks between 1980 and 2010, using a combination of atmospheric measurements and results from chemical transport models, ecosystem models, climate chemistry models and inventories of anthropogenic emissions. The resultant budgets suggest that data-driven approaches and ecosystem models overestimate total natural emissions. We build three contrasting emission scenarios-which differ in fossil fuel and microbial emissions-to explain the decadal variability in atmospheric methane levels detected, here and in previous studies, since 1985. Although uncertainties in emission trends do not allow definitive conclusions to be drawn, we show that the observed stabilization of methane levels between 1999 and 2006 can potentially be explained by decreasing-to-stable fossil fuel emissions, combined with stable-to-increasing microbial emissions. We show that a rise in natural wetland emissions and fossil fuel emissions probably accounts for the renewed increase in global methane levels after 2006, although the relative contribution of these two sources remains uncertain.

Constraining global methane emissions and uptake by ecosystems

Natural methane (CH 4) emissions from wet ecosystems are an important part of today’s global CH 4 budget. Climate affects the exchange of CH 4 between ecosystems and the atmosphere by influencing CH 4 production, oxidation, and transport in the soil. The net CH 4 exchange depends on ecosystem hydrology, soil and vegetation characteristics. Here, the LPJ-WHyMe global dynamical vegetation model is used to simulate global net CH 4 emissions for different ecosystems: northern peatlands (45 –90 N), naturally inundated wetlands (60 ◦ S–45 N), rice agriculture and wet mineral soils. Mineral soils are a potential CH 4 sink, but can also be a source with the direction of the net exchange depending on soil moisture content. The geographical and seasonal distributions are evaluated against multi-dimensional atmospheric inversions for 2003–2005, using two independent four-dimensional variational assimilation systems. The atmospheric inversions are constrained by the atmospheric CH4 observations of the SCIAMACHY satellite instrument and global surface networks. Compared to LPJ-WHyMe the inversions result in a significant reduction in the emissions from northern peatlands and suggest that LPJ-WHyMe maximum annual emissions peak about one month late. The Correspondence to: R. Spahni (spahni@climate.unibe.ch) inversions do not put strong constraints on the division of sources between inundated wetlands and wet mineral soils in the tropics. Based on the inversion results we diagnose model parameters in LPJ-WHyMe and simulate the surface exchange of CH4 over the period 1990–2008. Over the whole period we infer an increase of global ecosystem CH 4 emissions of+1.11 Tg CH4 yr−1, not considering potential additional changes in wetland extent. The increase in simulated CH4 emissions is attributed to enhanced soil respiration resulting from the observed rise in land temperature and in atmospheric carbon dioxide that were used as input. The longterm decline of the atmospheric CH 4 growth rate from 1990 to 2006 cannot be fully explained with the simulated ecosystem emissions. However, these emissions show an increasing trend of+3.62 Tg CH4 yr−1 over 2005–2008 which can partly explain the renewed increase in atmospheric CH 4 conentration during recent years.

A European summertime CO2 biogenic flux inversion at mesoscale from continuous in situ mixing ratio measurements

A regional variational inverse modeling system for the estimation of European biogenic CO2 fluxes is presented. This system is based on a 50 km horizontal resolution configuration of a mesoscale atmospheric transport model and on the adjoint of its tracer transport code. It exploits hourly CO2 in situ data from 15 CarboEurope-Integrated Project stations. Particular attention in the inversion setup is paid to characterizing the transport model error and to selecting the observations to be assimilated as a function of this error. Comparisons between simulations and data of CO2 and Rn-222 concentrations indicate that the model errors should have a standard deviation which is less than 7 ppm when simulating the hourly variability of CO2 at low altitude during the afternoon and evening or at high altitude at night. Synthetic data are used to estimate the uncertainty reduction for the fluxes using this inverse modeling system. The improvement brought by the inversion to the prior estimate of the fluxes for both the mean diurnal cycle and the monthly to synoptic variability in the fluxes and associated mixing ratios are checked against independent atmospheric data and eddy covariance flux measurements. Inverse modeling is conducted for summers 2002-2007 which should reduce the uncertainty in the biogenic fluxes by similar to 60% during this period. The trend in the mean flux corrections between June and September is to increase the uptake of CO2 by similar to 12 gCm(-2). Corrections at higher resolution are also diagnosed that reveal some limitations of the underlying prior model of the terrestrial biosphere. (Less)