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An estimate of equilibrium sensitivity of global terrestrial carbon cycle using NCAR CCSM4

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Abstract

Increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 influence climate, terrestrial biosphere productivity and ecosystem carbon storage through its radiative, physiological and fertilization effects. In this paper, we quantify these effects for a doubling of CO2 using a low resolution configuration of the coupled model NCAR CCSM4. In contrast to previous coupled climate-carbon modeling studies, we focus on the near-equilibrium response of the terrestrial carbon cycle. For a doubling of CO2, the radiative effect on the physical climate system causes global mean surface air temperature to increase by 2.14 K, whereas the physiological and fertilization on the land biosphere effects cause a warming of 0.22 K, suggesting that these later effects increase global warming by about 10 % as found in many recent studies. The CO2-fertilization leads to total ecosystem carbon gain of 371 Gt-C (28 %) while the radiative effect causes a loss of 131 Gt-C (~10 %) indicating that climate warming damps the fertilization-induced carbon uptake over land. Our model-based estimate for the maximum potential terrestrial carbon uptake resulting from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration (285–570 ppm) is only 242 Gt-C. This highlights the limited storage capacity of the terrestrial carbon reservoir. We also find that the terrestrial carbon storage sensitivity to changes in CO2 and temperature have been estimated to be lower in previous transient simulations because of lags in the climate-carbon system. Our model simulations indicate that the time scale of terrestrial carbon cycle response is greater than 500 years for CO2-fertilization and about 200 years for temperature perturbations. We also find that dynamic changes in vegetation amplify the terrestrial carbon storage sensitivity relative to a static vegetation case: because of changes in tree cover, changes in total ecosystem carbon for CO2-direct and climate effects are amplified by 88 and 72 %, respectively, in simulations with dynamic vegetation when compared to static vegetation simulations.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Drs. Chris Jones and Sam Levis for their critical comments and suggestions which helped us to improve the original manuscript substantially. Financial support from Department of Science and Technology under the grant DST 0948 is gratefully acknowledged. Dr. Devaraju and Mr. Krishna are supported by the Divecha Center for Climate Change.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Divecha Center for Climate Change, Center for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560012, India

    G. Bala, Sujith Krishna & Devaraju Narayanappa

  2. Department of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, Zhejiang Province, China

    Long Cao

  3. Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Ken Caldeira

  4. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, 94035, USA

    Ramakrishna Nemani

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  1. G. Bala
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  6. Ramakrishna Nemani
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Correspondence to G. Bala.

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Bala, G., Krishna, S., Narayanappa, D. et al. An estimate of equilibrium sensitivity of global terrestrial carbon cycle using NCAR CCSM4. Clim Dyn 40, 1671–1686 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1495-9

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