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  • Matters Arising
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On the role of atmospheric model transport uncertainty in estimating the Chinese land carbon sink

Nature volume 603, pages E13–E14 (2022)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 16 March 2022

The Original Article was published on 28 October 2020

arising from J. Wang et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2849-9 (2020).

In a recently published Article, Wang et al.1 argue that newly available in situ carbon dioxide (CO2) measurements in China lead to a large upward revision of the Chinese land biosphere carbon sink that would offset 45% of Chinese fossil fuel emissions, as opposed to 18% or less reported by previous studies2,3,4. This increased carbon sink estimate comes from a CO2 flux inversion, in which an atmospheric chemistry transport model (CTM) and data assimilation methods are used to estimate surface fluxes optimally consistent with observed atmospheric CO2 gradients. The authors argue that this upward revision of the estimated Chinese land sink is robust considering the uncertainty estimate provided by the inverse modelling technique; however, that uncertainty estimate does not account for systematic errors in the CTM, a priori fluxes and the assimilated data. Here we argue that a part of the upward revision reported by Wang et al.1 may be due to systematic differences between the CTMs used by Wang et al.1 and the previous studies2,3,4.

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Fig. 1: Land biosphere flux estimates over China from inverse models using GEOS-Chem and TM5 for atmospheric transport.
Fig. 2: GEOS-Chem minus TM5 XCO2.

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Acknowledgements

A.E.S.’s research was performed at Colorado State University under a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NSSCK1312). A.R.J.’s research was carried out at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Global Monitoring Laboratory and the University of Colorado under grant 80NSSC18K1115 from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. B.B.’s research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CIRA, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Andrew E. Schuh & David F. Baker

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Brendan Byrne

  3. CIRES, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Andrew R. Jacobson

  4. NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, Boulder, CO, USA

    Andrew R. Jacobson

  5. Department of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, USA

    Sean M. R. Crowell

  6. Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Feng Deng

  7. Earth Science Division, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Matthew S. Johnson

  8. NASA Academic Mission Services by Universities Space Research Association at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA, USA

    Sajeev Philip

  9. Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, MD, USA

    Brad Weir

  10. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Brad Weir

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Contributions

A.E.S., A.R.J. and B.B. were the primary authors of this response with comments and feedback from the remaining co-authors, who were participants of the OCO-2 v9 MIP exercise. All authors contributed to the final version.

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Correspondence to Andrew E. Schuh.

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Schuh, A.E., Byrne, B., Jacobson, A.R. et al. On the role of atmospheric model transport uncertainty in estimating the Chinese land carbon sink. Nature 603, E13–E14 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04258-9

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