B53K-02
A Large Contribution of Combustion-related Emissions to the Atmospheric Budget of Phosphorus
Friday, 18 December 2015: 13:55
2010 (Moscone West)
Rong Wang1, Yves Balkanski2, Olivier Boucher3, Philippe Ciais2, Josep Penuelas4 and Shu Tao5, (1)Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Paris, France, (2)LSCE Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement, Gif-Sur-Yvette Cedex, France, (3)LMD, Paris Cedex 05, France, (4)CREAF, Cerdanyola Del Valle, Spain, (5)Peking University, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Beijing, China
Abstract:
Atmospheric phosphorus (P) is an important fertilizer for terrestrial plant and marine phytoplankton. Understanding the budget of atmospheric P is helpful to uncovering the Earth’s biogeochemical cycle of P. However, this budget was not well balanced in previous studies, with global deposition exceeding estimated emissions from wildfires, fossil fuel combustion, dust, volcanoes, sea-salt and biogenic particles. Here we re-estimate the combustion-related emissions of P into the atmosphere using a new method based on the mass balance (Wang et al., Nature Geoscience, 8, 48-54, 2015). We derive a combustion-related emission of 1.8 Tg P yr-1 (90% confidence from 0.5 to 4.4), comprising over 50% of global atmospheric sources, higher than the 5% previously estimated. Resultant total source to the atmosphere (3.5 Tg P yr-1, 90% confidence from 0.9 to 7.8) translates to a deposition sink of 2.7 Tg P yr-1 over land and 0.8 Tg P yr-1 over the oceans, when prescribed to an atmospheric transport model. P deposition rates observed at a set of measurement stations can be well captured by the model, indicating a near balance of the budget. Our result implies a larger human perturbation on the atmospheric P cycle than thought.
