B12D-05
Tipping points of terrestrial biome carbon storage

Monday, 14 December 2015: 11:20
2010 (Moscone West)
Chuixiang Yi1,2, Xiyan Xu3, Jonas Nycander2, Mats B Nilsson4 and William J Riley3, (1)CUNY Queens College, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Flushing, NY, United States, (2)Stockholm University, Dept of Meteorology, Stockholm, Sweden, (3)Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States, (4)SLU Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Umea, UmeƄ, Sweden
Abstract:
Here, we use a simple land carbon budget model to investigate the tipping points of terrestrial carbon storage to climate change and the increasing of atmospheric CO2 based on data produced by the earth system models and collected by FLUXNET. We found that with increasing of atmospheric CO2: (1) the carbon storage of broadleaf evergreen forests will keep increasing even the increasing rate becomes slow; (2) the capacity of coniferous forest carbon storage will become saturated at certain level of atmospheric CO2; and (3) the terrestrial ecosystems of tundra, C3 and C4 grasslands will transit from carbon sinks into carbon sources at critical level of the atmospheric CO2, respectively.

Acknowledgements

This work was performed while CY was a Rossby Fellow, and he is grateful to the International Meteorological Institute of Sweden.