Investigating Terrestrial Carbon Uptake Over India Using Multimodel Simulations of Gross Primary Productivity and Satellite‐Based Biophysical Product

Abstract

Terrestrial ecosystems play a central role in the global carbon cycle and climate mitigation due to their offering of a large carbon sink. More than one‐fifth of the geographical area of India, one of the largest nations on the Earth, is forested, which is highly diverse in vegetation and climate types, offers huge potential for carbon sequestration, but remains vulnerable to climate change. Hence, it is imperative to know the future changes in the terrestrial carbon budget over this region. Gross primary productivity (GPP) represents the carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems. The multimodel ensembles of GPP simulated by the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) provide a useful means in this regard. In this work, we study the strength and variability of GPP over India in the near‐past and future using these simulations. In future, all the models show an increasing trend in GPP, however, with widely varying trends. The preferred month of carbon uptake differs among the models. A comparison with a satellite biophysical record shows the models underestimated the GPP during the near‐past over India. The carbon uptake in the Eastern Himalaya dominates the Western Himalaya and central Indian regions. Specifically, till 2100, the growth rate of GPP varies from 4.9 to 16.69 gC m−2 y−2, from 2.47 to 18.91 gC m−2 y−2, and from 0.32 to 21.95 gC m−2 y−2 over these three regions, respectively.

Promoting low-carbon land use: from theory to practical application through exploring new methods

“…However, there are still many shortcomings. First, evaluations of terrestrial ecosystem carbon are usually conducted at large scales, such as continents (Winkler et al 2023), countries (Uchale et al 2023) and provinces (Ran et al 2023), and the resolution is often not high. Additionally, due to the use of different data sources and models, such as the Ecosystem process modelling method (He et al 2019), the Atmospheric inversion method , the Eddy covariance method (Yu et al 2014) and the Inventory method (Piao et al 2009), the amount of carbon sink/ source in China still faces significant uncertainties; carbon sink values varied between 0.1 Pg C/yr and higher than 1.0 Pg C/yr (Chuai et al 2018).…”