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Significant contribution of combustion-related emissions to the atmospheric phosphorus budget

Nature Geoscience volume 8, pages 48–54 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Atmospheric phosphorus fertilizes plants and contributes to Earth’s biogeochemical phosphorus cycle. However, calculations of the global budget of atmospheric phosphorus have been unbalanced, with global deposition exceeding estimated emissions from dust and sea-salt transport, volcanic eruptions, biogenic sources and combustion of fossil fuels, biofuels and biomass, the latter of which thought to contribute about 5% of total emissions. Here we use measurements of the phosphorus content of various fuels and estimates of the partitioning of phosphorus during combustion to calculate phosphorus emissions to the atmosphere from all combustion sources. We estimate combustion-related emissions of 1.8 Tg P yr−1, which represent over 50% of global atmospheric sources of phosphorus. Using these estimates in atmospheric transport model simulations, we find that the total global emissions of atmospheric phosphorus (3.5 Tg P yr−1) translate to a depositional sink of 2.7 Tg P yr−1 over land and 0.8 Tg P yr−1 over the oceans. The modelled spatial patterns of phosphorus deposition agree with observations from globally distributed measurement stations, and indicate a near balance of the phosphorus budget. Our finding suggests that the perturbation of the global phosphorus cycle by anthropogenic emissions is larger thanpreviously thought.

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Figure 1: Frequency distributions of phosphorus contents of different fuels.
Figure 2: Historical trends of phosphorus emissions from fossil fuels, biofuels, deforestation fires and natural fires.
Figure 3: Spatial distributions of phosphorus deposition.
Figure 4: Comparison between modelled and observed phosphorus deposition with or without accounting for phosphorus emissions from combustion.
Figure 5: Historical evolution of atmospheric sources of phosphorus and nitrogen.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ether/ECCAD for distribution of emission data used in this study. We thank B. G. Li, F. Zhou, W. M. Hao, Y. Ying and M. McGrath for discussions, and J. Gash for editing the English. R.W. was supported by the ‘FABIO’ project, a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship from the European Commission. This work was also conducted as part of the ‘IMBALANCE-P’ project of the European Research Council (ERC-2013-SyG-610028). S.T. was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (41390240, 41130754) and the 111 Program (B14001). Some of the computations were performed using HPC resources from GENCI-TGCC (grant 2014-t2014012201).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, CEA CNRS UVSQ, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Rong Wang, Yves Balkanski & Philippe Ciais

  2. Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, 100871 Beijing, China

    Rong Wang & Shu Tao

  3. Sino-French Institute for Earth System Science, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, 100871 Beijing, China

    Rong Wang, Yves Balkanski, Philippe Ciais & Shu Tao

  4. Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, IPSL/CNRS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France

    Olivier Boucher

  5. CSIC, Global Ecology Unit CREAF-CEAB-UAB, Cerdanyola del Vallès, 08193 Catalonia, Spain

    Josep Peñuelas

  6. CREAF, Cerdanyola del Vallès, 08193 Catalonia, Spain

    Josep Peñuelas

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  1. Rong Wang
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R.W. designed the research, performed all calculations and analysed the uncertainties. All authors took part in interpreting the results and writing the paper.

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Correspondence to Rong Wang.

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Wang, R., Balkanski, Y., Boucher, O. et al. Significant contribution of combustion-related emissions to the atmospheric phosphorus budget. Nature Geosci 8, 48–54 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2324

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