GC13I-04
Magnitude and Uncertainty of Carbon Pools and Fluxes in the US Forests

Monday, 14 December 2015: 14:25
3008 (Moscone West)
Sassan S Saatchi1,2, Alexander Fore3, Yifan Yu1, Christopher W Woodall4, Sangram Ganguly5, Ramakrishna R Nemani5, Stephen Hagen6, Nancy Harris, Richard Birdsey8, Sandra Brown9, William Salas6 and Kristofer D Johnson10, (1)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (2)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (3)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (4)US Forest Service St. Paul, St. Paul, MN, United States, (5)NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, United States, (6)Applied Geosolutions, LLC, Durham, NH, United States, (7)USDA Forest Service Northern Research Statiuon, Newtown Square, PA, United States, (8)Winrock, Arlington, VA, United States, (9)U.S. Forest Service, Newtown Square, PA, United States
Abstract:
Sassan Saatchi1,2, Stephan Hagen3, Christopher Woodall4 , Sangram Ganguly,5 Nancy Harris6, Sandra Brown7, Timothy Pearson7, Alexander Fore1, Yifan Yu1, Rama Nemani5, Gong Zhang5, William Salas4, Roger Cooke8

1 NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA

2 Institute of Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

3 Applied Geosolutions, 55 Main Street Suit 125, Newmarket, NH 03857, USA

4 USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, Saint Paul, MN 55108, USA

5 NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA

6 Forests Program, World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, 20002, USA

7 Winrock International, Ecosystem Services Unit, Arlington, VA 22202, USA

8 Risk Analysis Resources for the Future, Washington DC 20036-1400

Assessment of the carbon sinks and sources associated with greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes across the US forestlands is a priority of the national climate mitigation policy. However, estimates of fluxes from the land sector are less precise compared to other sectors because of the large sources of uncertainty in quantifying the carbon pools, emissions, and removals associated with anthropogenic (land use) and natural changes in the US forestlands. As part of the NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, we developed a methodology based on a combination of ground inventory and space observations to develop spatially refined carbon pools and fluxes including the gross emissions and sequestration of carbon at each 1-ha land unit across the forestlands in the continental United States (CONUS) for the period of 2006-2010. Here, we provide the magnitude and uncertainty of multiple pools and fluxes of the US forestlands and outline the observational requirements to reduce the uncertainties for developing national climate mitigation policies based on the carbon sequestration capacity of the US forest lands.

Keywords: forests, carbon pools, greenhouse gas, land use, attribution

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