scholarly journals Widespread decline in winds delayed autumn foliar senescence over high latitudes

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (16) ◽  
pp. e2015821118
Author(s):  
Chaoyang Wu ◽  
Jian Wang ◽  
Philippe Ciais ◽  
Josep Peñuelas ◽  
Xiaoyang Zhang ◽  
...  

The high northern latitudes (>50°) experienced a pronounced surface stilling (i.e., decline in winds) with climate change. As a drying factor, the influences of changes in winds on the date of autumn foliar senescence (DFS) remain largely unknown and are potentially important as a mechanism explaining the interannual variability of autumn phenology. Using 183,448 phenological observations at 2,405 sites, long-term site-scale water vapor and carbon dioxide flux measurements, and 34 y of satellite greenness data, here we show that the decline in winds is significantly associated with extended DFS and could have a relative importance comparable with temperature and precipitation effects in contributing to the DFS trends. We further demonstrate that decline in winds reduces evapotranspiration, which results in less soil water losses and consequently more favorable growth conditions in late autumn. In addition, declining winds also lead to less leaf abscission damage which could delay leaf senescence and to a decreased cooling effect and therefore less frost damage. Our results are potentially useful for carbon flux modeling because an improved algorithm based on these findings projected overall widespread earlier DFS than currently expected by the end of this century, contributing potentially to a positive feedback to climate.

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 1528-1536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan N.D. Auclair ◽  
Thomas B. Carter

Since 1977, the extent of forest wildfires in the boreal and western regions of North America increased 6- to 9-fold over long-term trends, and an estimated 132 × 106 ha of temperate and boreal forest burned across the northern hemisphere. Emissions during and after burning may have been a significant feedback to global warming. Simulated carbon budgets indicated a hemispheric release of 1.4 Pg C during burning and 4.1 Pg C gross from CO2 fluxes postfire. The total release (5.5 Pg C) was 43% of the biospheric CO2 release to the atmosphere, 1977–1990. Over the next century (1991–2090), continuing emissions from wood and soil decomposition will release an additional 6.9 Pg C gross. A large CO2 release was contrary to assumptions of little net carbon flux in the temperate and boreal forests. The pattern of attenuated CO2 release in northern forests also contrasted with sharp emission peaks in tropical deforestation. A simulation experiment indicated that the CO2 pulse from direct emissions per unit area was 10-fold larger in tropical deforestation than in northern forest wildfires on average; postfire release in the northern systems, however, was about 10 times longer in duration and only slightly less overall than in tropical deforestation fires.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Atanu Bhattacharya ◽  
Tobias Bolch ◽  
Kriti Mukherjee ◽  
Owen King ◽  
Brian Menounos ◽  
...  

AbstractKnowledge about the long-term response of High Mountain Asian glaciers to climatic variations is paramount because of their important role in sustaining Asian river flow. Here, a satellite-based time series of glacier mass balance for seven climatically different regions across High Mountain Asia since the 1960s shows that glacier mass loss rates have persistently increased at most sites. Regional glacier mass budgets ranged from −0.40 ± 0.07 m w.e.a−1 in Central and Northern Tien Shan to −0.06 ± 0.07 m w.e.a−1 in Eastern Pamir, with considerable temporal and spatial variability. Highest rates of mass loss occurred in Central Himalaya and Northern Tien Shan after 2015 and even in regions where glaciers were previously in balance with climate, such as Eastern Pamir, mass losses prevailed in recent years. An increase in summer temperature explains the long-term trend in mass loss and now appears to drive mass loss even in regions formerly sensitive to both temperature and precipitation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliane Helm ◽  
Henrik Hartmann ◽  
Martin Göbel ◽  
Boaz Hilman ◽  
David Herrera ◽  
...  

Abstract Tree stem CO2 efflux is an important component of ecosystem carbon fluxes and has been the focus of many studies. While CO2 efflux can easily be measured, a growing number of studies have shown that it is not identical with actual in situ respiration. Complementing measurements of CO2 flux with simultaneous measurements of O2 flux provides an additional proxy for respiration, and the combination of both fluxes can potentially help getting closer to actual measures of respiratory fluxes. To date, however, the technical challenge to measure relatively small changes in O2 concentration against its high atmospheric background has prevented routine O2 measurements in field applications. Here we present a new and low-cost field-tested device for autonomous real-time and quasi-continuous long-term measurements of stem respiration by combining CO2 (NDIR based) and O2 (quenching based) sensors in a tree stem chamber. Our device operates as a cyclic closed system and measures changes in both CO2 and O2 concentration within the chamber over time. The device is battery-powered with a > 1 week power independence and data acquisition is conveniently achieved by an internal logger. Results from both field and laboratory tests document that our sensors provide reproducible measurements of CO2 and O2 exchange fluxes under varying environmental conditions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloé M. Marcilly ◽  
Trond H. Torsvik ◽  
Mathew Domeier ◽  
Dana L. Royer

<p>CO<sub>2</sub> is the most important greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere and has fluctuated considerably over geological time. However, proxies for past CO<sub>2 </sub>concentrations have large uncertainties and are mostly limited to Devonian and younger times. Consequently, CO<sub>2</sub> modelling plays a key role in reconstructing past climate fluctuations. Facing the limitations with the current CO<sub>2</sub> models, we aim to refine two important forcings for CO<sub>2</sub> levels over the Phanerozoic, namely carbon degassing and silicate weathering.</p><p>Silicate weathering and carbonate deposition is widely recognized as a primary sink of carbon on geological timescales and is largely influenced by changes in climate, which in turn is linked to changes in paleogeography. The role of paleogeography on silicate weathering fluxes has been the focus of several studies in recent years. Their aims were mostly to constrain climatic parameters such as temperature and precipitation affecting weathering rates through time. However, constraining the availability of exposed land is crucial in assessing the theoretical amount of weathering on geological time scales. Associated with changes in climatic zones, the fluctuation of sea-level is critical for defining the amount of land exposed to weathering. The current reconstructions used in<sub></sub>models tend to overestimate the amount of exposed land to weathering at periods with high sea levels. Through the construction of continental flooding maps, we constrain the effective land area undergoing silicate weathering for the past 520 million years. Our maps not only reflect sea-level fluctuations but also contain climate-sensitive indicators such as coal (since the Early Devonian) and evaporites to evaluate climate gradients and potential weatherablity through time. This is particularly important after the Pangea supercontinent formed but also for some time after its break-up.</p><p>Whilst silicate weathering is an important CO<sub>2</sub> sink, volcanic carbon degassing is a major source but one of the least constrained climate forcing parameters. There is no clear consensus on the history of degassing through geological time as there are no direct proxies for reconstructing carbon degassing, but various proxy methods have been postulated. We propose new estimates of plate tectonic degassing for the Phanerozoic using both subduction flux from full-plate models and zircon age distribution from arcs (arc-activity) as proxies.</p><p>The effect of revised modelling parameters for weathering and degassing was tested in the well-known long-term models GEOCARBSULF and COPSE. They revealed the high influence of degassing on CO<sub>2</sub> levels using those models, highlighting the need for enhanced research in this direction. The use of arc-activity as a proxy for carbon degassing leads to interesting responses in the Mesozoic and brings model estimates closer to CO<sub>2 </sub> proxy values. However, from simulations using simultaneously the revised input parameters (i.e weathering and degassing) large model-proxy discrepancies remain and notably for the Triassic and Jurassic.</p><p> </p>


Author(s):  
Panpan Zhang ◽  
Anhui Gu

This paper is devoted to the long-term behavior of nonautonomous random lattice dynamical systems with nonlinear diffusion terms. The nonlinear drift and diffusion terms are not expected to be Lipschitz continuous but satisfy the continuity and growth conditions. We first prove the existence of solutions, and establish the existence of a multi-valued nonautonomous cocycle. We then show the existence and uniqueness of pullback attractors parameterized by sample parameters. Finally, we establish the measurability of this pullback attractor by the method based on the weak upper semicontinuity of the solutions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 41-48
Author(s):  
Halina A. Kamyshenka

The results of a statistical assessment of the influence of changing weather and climatic conditions of the territory of Belarus on the productivity of the main winter cereal crops are presented in order to build computational models of productivity. The calculations were made with respect to the climatic component as a predictor, taking into account the deviations of air temperature and precipitation from the long-term climatic norm of months that have the most significant effect on the yield of the studied crops. For winter rye and wheat, adequate models of yield variability have been built. The research results are relevant for solving forecasting problems.


1997 ◽  
Vol 54 (spe) ◽  
pp. 155-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.T. de Faria ◽  
M.V. Folegatti ◽  
J.A. Frizzone ◽  
A.M. Saad

The economical benefits of different irrigation strategies were assessed by long term simulation (20 years) for dry beans in Paraná, Brazil. The model BEANGRO was used to simulate crop yield and irrigation requirements assuming eight levels of irrigation threshold (20 to 90% of the remaining soil available water in steps of 10%), in addition to a level considering no irrigation. Net return was the objective function to select the optimum irrigation management strategy, assuming fixed and stochastic distributions of historical product price. The results showed that yield was significantly increased by irrigation despite a high variability for all the simulation strategies, due to variations on growth conditions over the years. Although the net return was highly variable, it was positive in 75% of the years for all strategies with threshold values higher than 30%. The strategy of irrigating the crop before the soil reaches 60% AW provided the maximum economical benefits. The high profit using this improved strategy justifies the practice of irrigation for beans in Paraná.


2013 ◽  
Vol 59 (217) ◽  
pp. 992-1006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Farinotti

AbstractStudies addressing the response of glaciers to climate change have so far analyzed the effect of long-term trends in a particular set of meteorological variables only, implicitly assuming an unaltered climatic variability. Here a framework for distinguishing between year-to-year, month-to-month and day-to-day variability is proposed. Synthetically generated temperature and precipitation time series following the same long-term trend but with altered variability are then used to force an ice-dynamics model set up for Rhonegletscher, Swiss Alps. In the case of temperature, variations in the day-to-day variability are shown to have a larger effect than changes at the yearly scale, while in the case of precipitation, variability changes are assessed as having negligible impact. A first set of scenarios is used to show that compared to reference, doubling the temperature variability can reduce glacier ice volume by up to 64% within half a decade. A second set derived from the results of the European ENSEMBLES project, however, shows that such changes are expected to remain below 8% even for extreme scenarios. Although the latter results relativize the importance of the effect in the near future, the analyses indicate that at least caution is required when assuming ‘unchanged variability’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (45) ◽  
pp. 11543-11548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Altman ◽  
Olga N. Ukhvatkina ◽  
Alexander M. Omelko ◽  
Martin Macek ◽  
Tomas Plener ◽  
...  

Determination of long-term tropical cyclone (TC) variability is of enormous importance to society; however, changes in TC activity are poorly understood owing to discrepancies among various datasets and limited span of instrumental records. While the increasing intensity and frequency of TCs have been previously documented on a long-term scale using various proxy records, determination of their poleward migration has been based mostly on short-term instrumental data. Here we present a unique tree-ring–based approach for determination of long-term variability in TC activity via forest disturbance rates in northeast Asia (33–45°N). Our results indicate significant long-term changes in TC activity, with increased rates of disturbances in the northern latitudes over the past century. The disturbance frequency was stable over time in the southern latitudes, however. Our findings of increasing disturbance frequency in the areas formerly situated at the edge of TC activity provide evidence supporting the broad relevance of poleward migration of TCs. Our results significantly enhance our understanding of the effects of climate change on TCs and emphasize the need for determination of long-term variation of past TC activity to improve future TC projections.


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