Journal
GLOBAL BIOGEOCHEMICAL CYCLES
Volume 30, Issue 7, Pages 1015-1037Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1002/2016GB005405
Keywords
carbon cycle; climate change; permafrost; permafrost carbon feedback; sensitivity; soil carbon
Funding
- National Science Foundation through Research Coordination Network program
- National Science Foundation through Study of Environmental Arctic Change program
- U.S. Geological Survey
- U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (Biological and Environmental Research)
- University of Victoria
- NSERC CGS
- NSERC CREATE
- Joint DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme [GA01101]
- European Union FP7-ENVIRONMENT project [PAGE21]
- program CLASSIQUE of the French Agence Nationale pour la Recherche
- Program for Risk Information on Climate Change, MEXT, Japan
- Modeling the Regional and Global Earth System activity
- Lund University Centre for the study of Climate and Carbon Cycle
- Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr
- Div Of Information & Intelligent Systems [1028291] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Directorate For Geosciences
- Office of Polar Programs (OPP) [1304271] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Environmental Biology
- Direct For Biological Sciences [1026415] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Office of Polar Programs (OPP)
- Directorate For Geosciences [1331100] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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A significant portion of the large amount of carbon (C) currently stored in soils of the permafrost region in the Northern Hemisphere has the potential to be emitted as the greenhouse gases CO2 and CH4 under a warmer climate. In this study we evaluated the variability in the sensitivity of permafrost and C in recent decades among land surface model simulations over the permafrost region between 1960 and 2009. The 15 model simulations all predict a loss of near-surface permafrost (within 3m) area over the region, but there are large differences in the magnitude of the simulated rates of loss among the models (0.2 to 58.8x10(3)km(2)yr(-1)). Sensitivity simulations indicated that changes in air temperature largely explained changes in permafrost area, although interactions among changes in other environmental variables also played a role. All of the models indicate that both vegetation and soil C storage together have increased by 156 to 954TgCyr(-1) between 1960 and 2009 over the permafrost region even though model analyses indicate that warming alone would decrease soil C storage. Increases in gross primary production (GPP) largely explain the simulated increases in vegetation and soil C. The sensitivity of GPP to increases in atmospheric CO2 was the dominant cause of increases in GPP across the models, but comparison of simulated GPP trends across the 1982-2009 period with that of a global GPP data set indicates that all of the models overestimate the trend in GPP. Disturbance also appears to be an important factor affecting C storage, as models that consider disturbance had lower increases in C storage than models that did not consider disturbance. To improve the modeling of C in the permafrost region, there is the need for the modeling community to standardize structural representation of permafrost and carbon dynamics among models that are used to evaluate the permafrost C feedback and for the modeling and observational communities to jointly develop data sets and methodologies to more effectively benchmark models.
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