Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
© The Author(s), 2014. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Biogeosciences 11 (2014): 1693-1704, doi:10.5194/bg-11-1693-2014.
Description:
Effects of various spatial scales of water table dynamics on land–atmospheric methane (CH4) exchanges have not yet been assessed for large regions. Here we used a coupled hydrology–biogeochemistry model to quantify daily CH4 exchanges over the pan-Arctic from 1993 to 2004 at two spatial scales of 100 km and 5 km. The effects of sub-grid spatial variability of the water table depth (WTD) on CH4 emissions were examined with a TOPMODEL-based parameterization scheme for the northern high latitudes. We found that both WTD and CH4 emissions are better simulated at a 5 km spatial resolution. By considering the spatial heterogeneity of WTD, net regional CH4 emissions at a 5 km resolution are 38.1–55.4 Tg CH4 yr−1 from 1993 to 2004, which are on average 42% larger than those simulated at a 100 km resolution using a grid-cell-mean WTD scheme. The difference in annual CH4 emissions is attributed to the increased emitting area and enhanced flux density with finer resolution for WTD. Further, the inclusion of sub-grid WTD spatial heterogeneity also influences the inter-annual variability of CH4 emissions. Soil temperature plays an important role in the 100 km estimates, while the 5 km estimates are mainly influenced by WTD. This study suggests that previous macro-scale biogeochemical models using a grid-cell-mean WTD scheme might have underestimated the regional CH4 emissions. The spatial scale-dependent effects of WTD should be considered in future quantification of regional CH4 emissions.
Description:
The research is funded by a DOE SciDAC
project and an Abrupt Climate Change project. This study is also
supported through projects funded by the NASA Land Use and
Land Cover Change program (NASA-NNX09AI26G), Department
of Energy (DE-FG02-08ER64599), the NSF Division of Information
& Intelligent Systems (NSF-1028291), and the NSF Carbon
and Water in the Earth Program (NSF-0630319). This research is
also in part supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of
Biological and Environmental Research of the US Department of
Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 as part of their
Earth System Modeling Program.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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