A Global Synthesis Inversion Analysis of Recent Variability in CO Fluxes Using GOSAT and In Situ Observations.

The precise contribution of the two major sinks for anthropogenic CO emissions, terrestrial vegetation and the ocean, and their location and year-to-year variability are not well understood. Top-down estimates of the spatiotemporal variations in emissions and uptake of CO are expected to benefit from the increasing measurement density brought by recent in situ and remote CO observations. We uniquely apply a batch Bayesian synthesis inversion at relatively high resolution to in situ surface observations and bias-corrected GOSAT satellite column CO retrievals to deduce the global distributions of natural CO fluxes during 2009-2010.

Corrigendum: Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake.

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13428.

A human-driven decline in global burned area.

Fire is an essential Earth system process that alters ecosystem and atmospheric composition. Here we assessed long-term fire trends using multiple satellite data sets. We found that global burned area declined by 24.

Recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO due to enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake.

Terrestrial ecosystems play a significant role in the global carbon cycle and offset a large fraction of anthropogenic CO emissions. The terrestrial carbon sink is increasing, yet the mechanisms responsible for its enhancement, and implications for the growth rate of atmospheric CO, remain unclear. Here using global carbon budget estimates, ground, atmospheric and satellite observations, and multiple global vegetation models, we report a recent pause in the growth rate of atmospheric CO, and a decline in the fraction of anthropogenic emissions that remain in the atmosphere, despite increasing anthropogenic emissions.

Large carbon release legacy from bark beetle outbreaks across Western United States.

Warmer conditions over the past two decades have contributed to rapid expansion of bark beetle outbreaks killing millions of trees over a large fraction of western United States (US) forests. These outbreaks reduce plant productivity by killing trees and transfer carbon from live to dead pools where carbon is slowly emitted to the atmosphere via heterotrophic respiration which subsequently feeds back to climate change. Recent studies have begun to examine the local impacts of bark beetle outbreaks in individual stands, but the full regional carbon consequences remain undocumented for the western US.