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Warm Summers Slow Carbon Uptake

On the other side of the country, Alon Angert was
puzzling over the same question as Goetz: what was
happening to Northern forests? Angert, a researcher at
the University of California, Berkeley, had been using
remote sensing and carbon dioxide measurements to
see how the biospherelife on Earth ranging from
plants and animals to soil microbeswas reacting to
climate change. We know that about quarter of the
CO
2
that humans emit into the atmosphere is taken up
by the land biosphere, but we want to know if the
biosphere will keep taking up CO
2
, he explains.
Angert was particularly interested in finding out how the
change in season affected the way plants use carbon
dioxide. To get an idea of what carbon dioxide levels
were on a global scale, he used carbon dioxide levels
taken from all ground stations and averaged by
latitude, focusing on latitudes above 20 degrees North
where seasonality impacts plants the most. Next, he
removed the long-term background increase in
carbon dioxide that has been occurring since the
Industrial Revolution to isolate the seasonal increase
and decrease caused by the biosphere breathing.
Then he divided the data into two periods: spring when
plants are coming to life and summer when plants are
taking up the most carbon dioxide.

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What we found is that the spring uptake was very
highly correlated with temperature, Angert says. The
warmer the spring temperatures were, the more
carbon dioxide the forest absorbed, just as theories
had predicted. The trend for the summer was a
different story. From 1985-1991, the forest did
continue to absorb more and more carbon dioxide as it
greened throughout the summer. But then, in 1991,
Mount Pinatubo erupted, sending a cloud of sulfate
aerosols into the upper atmosphere. The eruption
cooled global temperatures for two years, disrupting
the trend. When temperatures resumed climbing in
1994, a new trend began to emerge. The forest
continued to soak up more carbon dioxide with warmer
temperatures in the spring, but in the summer, the
trees stopped using as much carbon dioxide. The
biosphere didnt keep up, says Angert.
I was surprised, Angert remarks. Like Goetz and his
colleagues, Angert checked his data again. Still seeing
the shifting trend, he decided to look at vegetation
index data to confirm his observations. Had the forests
browned while they slowed their intake of carbon
dioxide?
After getting the same satellite-based vegetation data
from NASA that Goetz and his colleagues used, Angert
divided the data into spring and summer periods to
match his carbon dioxide observations. He then
averaged the vegetation index values by latitude and
saw that they echoed the carbon dioxide
measurements. In the spring and the summer of the
first period, the forests got greener with warmer
temperatures. But in the summer of the second period,
when he had seen a decrease in the amount of carbon
dioxide the biosphere absorbed, the forest got
browner.
Before the eruption of Mt.
Pinatubo (yellow block), carbon
uptake in Northern forests (blue
lines) increased as
temperatures increased (green
lines) in spring (top graph) and
during the entire growing
season (March-August, bottom
graph). When the cooling
period caused by Pinatubos
emissions ended, global
temperatures began to climb
again. Increases in temperature
continued to boost carbon
uptake in the spring, but over
the entire growing season,
warmer summers caused
carbon uptake to decline. The
light-colored lines show year-
to-year changes, while the
darker lines show the overall
trend. (Figures adapted from
Angert et al. by Robert
Simmon.)
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When you see the same thing happen in independent
data sets, it makes you think that what you are seeing
is real, Angert observes. As an extra check, he put the
satellite vegetation greenness measurements into a
model to estimate how much carbon dioxide was taken
from the atmosphere. The model predictions matched
what he had seen in the observations of carbon
dioxide.
Why would the forest head into this decline? Like
Goetz, Angert suspected drought. The forest was
doing fine in the spring, but by summer had run out of
water, and that was causing the browning trend, he
theorized. He matched the vegetation index data to the
Palmer Drought Index, a measure of drought that
compares the amount of water that is available to the
amount of water that plants need at certain
temperatures. Again he found a match. The forest
productivity had decreased when the drought index
indicated water shortages.
Ground Observations Support Satellite View
Satellites Reveal a Browning Forest
Arctic temperatures warmed
about 0.3C over the past 25
years. During the initial decade
of warming, boreal forests
responded with vigorous
growth. From 1994 to 2002,
however, growth in many
places slowed as temperatures
climbed and the forest dried
out. The maps above show
trends in greenness, or growth
(top pair), temperature (middle),
and drought (bottom) from
1982-1991 and 1994-2002. In
the earlier decade, increased
growth (green) was linked to
warmer temperatures (red)
across most of the North. In the
second decade, most of the
area experienced poorer
growth (brown) as
temperatures rose. A cooling
trend (blue) limited growth in
Alaska during the latter decade,
but the long-term trend in the
area is a warming one. A
Palmer drought index map
shows areas that experienced
drier (orange) or wetter (purple)
summers. (Maps adapted from
Angert et al. by Robert
Simmon.)