Net carbon emissions from African biosphere dominate pan-tropical atmospheric CO2 signal

Authors: Paul I. Palmer, Liang Feng, David Baker, Frédéric Chevallier, Hartmut Bösch, Peter Somkuti

Published: 2019-08-13

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11097-w

Source: Full article

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Abstract

AbstractTropical ecosystems are large carbon stores that are vulnerable to climate change. The sparseness of ground-based measurements has precluded verification of these ecosystems being a net annual source (+ve) or sink (−ve) of atmospheric carbon. We show that two independent satellite data sets of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), interpreted using independent models, are consistent with the land tropics being a net annual carbon emission of $$({\mathrm{median}}_{{\mathrm{minimum}}}^{{\mathrm{maximum}}})$$