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  • Matters Arising
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Autumn cooling paused increased CO2 release in central Eurasia

Nature Climate Change volume 13, pages 334–337 (2023)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 16 March 2023

The Original Article was published on 07 March 2022

arising from: R. Tang et al. Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01304-w (2022).

In a recent publication in Nature Climate Change, Tang et al.1 reported an increase in net CO2 release under northern autumn cooling from 2004 to 2018, indicating that both autumn warming and cooling result in net CO2 release. Here we show that the conclusion regarding net CO2 release under autumn cooling was impacted by the choice of the autumn period, which resulted in overlooking the appropriate cooling regions. Our analysis of individual months in autumn with empirical upscaling of eddy flux observations (FLUXCOM2, the same data used by Tang et al.1) and atmospheric CO2 measurements from seven towers3 suggested that the increased net CO2 release paused during the 2004–2018 autumn cooling in central Eurasia.

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Fig. 1: Regional patterns of 2004–2018 autumn cooling and associated GPP and TER trends for the land north of 25° N.
Fig. 2: Interannual variability of autumn NEE and CO2.

Data availability

CRU TS4.05, FLUXCOM and atmospheric CO2 measurements data used in this study are available respectively from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/cru_ts_4.05/), the data portal of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (https://www.bgc-jena.mpg.de/geodb/projects/Home.php) and the Global Environmental Dataset of the Center for Global Environmental Research at the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan (https://db.cger.nies.go.jp/portal/geds/atmosphericAndOceanicMonitoring?lang=eng).

Code availability

The codes used for the analyses are available from the corresponding author.

References

  1. Tang, R. et al. Increasing terrestrial ecosystem carbon release in response to autumn cooling and warming. Nat. Clim. Change 12, 380–385 (2022).

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  2. Jung, M. et al. Scaling carbon fluxes from eddy covariance sites to globe: synthesis and evaluation of the FLUXCOM approach. Biogeosciences 17, 1343–1365 (2020).

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  3. Sasakawa, M. et al. Continuous measurements of methane from a tower network over Siberia. Tellus B: Chem. Phys. Meteorol. 62, 403–416 (2010).

  4. Harris, I. et al. Version 4 of the CRU TS monthly high-resolution gridded multivariate climate dataset. Sci. Data 7, 109 (2020).

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  5. Peterson, J. T. et al. Atmospheric CO2 variations at Barrow, 1973–1982, Alaska. J. Atmos. Chem. 4, 491–510 (1986).

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Acknowledgements

M.K. and T.H. acknowledge support from JSPS KAKENHI (grant nos. 19H05668 and 19K12294). The measurements in central Eurasia were financially supported by the Global Environmental Research Coordination System from the Ministry of the Environment of Japan and partly by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (project no. 121031500342-0). M.K. acknowledges M. Takeuchi and K. Suganuma at the Graduate School of Bioagricultural Sciences, Nagoya University for supporting the processing of the Siberian CO2 data.

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Author notes

  1. Masayuki Kondo

    Present address: The IDEC Institute, Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima, Japan

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Masayuki Kondo & Tetsuya Hiyama

  2. National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan

    Motoki Sasakawa & Toshinobu Machida

  3. V. E. Zuev Institute of Atmospheric Optics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch, Tomsk, Russia

    Mikhail Arshinov

Authors
  1. Masayuki Kondo
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  2. Motoki Sasakawa
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  3. Toshinobu Machida
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  4. Mikhail Arshinov
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  5. Tetsuya Hiyama
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Contributions

M.K. designed the study, conducted the analysis and wrote the paper. All authors contributed to the discussion and manuscript writing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Masayuki Kondo.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Minkyu Moon and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary text, Figs. 1–3 and Table 1.

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Kondo, M., Sasakawa, M., Machida, T. et al. Autumn cooling paused increased CO2 release in central Eurasia. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 334–337 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01625-4

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