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The Amazon forest carbon sink is declining, mainly as a result of land-use and climate change 1-4 . Here we investigate how changes in law enforcement of environmental protection policies may have affected the Amazonian carbon balance between 2010 and 2018 compared with 2019 and 2020, based on atmospheric CO 2 vertical profiles 5,6 , deforestation 7 and fire data 8 , as well as infraction notices related to illegal deforestation 9 . We estimate that Amazonia carbon emissions increased from a mean of 0.24 ± 0.08 PgC year -1 in 2010-2018 to 0.44 ± 0.10 PgC year -1 in 2019 and 0.52 ± 0.10 PgC year -1 in 2020 (± uncertainty). The observed increases in deforestation were 82% and 77% (94% accuracy) and burned area were 14% and 42% in 2019 and 2020 compared with the 2010-2018 mean, respectively. We find that the numbers of notifications of infractions against flora decreased by 30% and 54% and fines paid by 74% and 89% in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Carbon losses during 2019-2020 were comparable with those of the record warm El Niño (2015-2016) without an extreme drought event. Statistical tests show that the observed differences between the 2010-2018 mean and 2019-2020 are unlikely to have arisen by chance. The changes in the carbon budget of Amazonia during 2019-2020 were mainly because of western Amazonia becoming a carbon source. Our results indicate that a decline in law enforcement led to increases in deforestation, biomass burning and forest degradation, which increased carbon emissions and enhanced drying and warming of the Amazon forests., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)

In TransCom-3 (Level 1), atmospheric CO2 measurements from 76 monitoring stations for the period 1992–1996 and 16 atmospheric transport models were used to constrain annual mean CO2 fluxes over 11 land and 11 ocean regions. The tower measurements of atmospheric CO2 from Fraserdale, a continental site in northern Ontario, Canada are now available and processed for use in the TransCom-3 inverse modelling framework. In this short study, we show that by including this set of continental CO2 data, the estimated flux for the North American boreal region becomes nearly zero, a reduction of about 0.26 Pg C yr−1 from the previous estimate. The uncertainty of the estimated flux for this region is also reduced by ∼30%. All transport models show negative changes for boreal North America, with the strongest responses (∼−0.5 Pg C yr−1) shown by NIRE, NIES, CSU and SKYHI. Furthermore, models showing a strong response in boreal North America tend to show strong sensitivity in middle- and high-latitude Asian regions.

This paper explores various sources of error in atmospheric CO2 synthesis inversions using global circulation models. The estimation of prior, observation, model transport, and representation errors is described, and the latter two error sources are explored in more detail. Not accounting for these errors will act as a hard constraint on the inversion and will produce incorrect solutions to the problem as is shown in some example inversions. The magnitude of these errors falls generally between about 10% and 100% in the retrieved fluxes but can be even larger. This makes it highly desirable to avoid hard constraints and apply any prior information we have about the surface fluxes as a weak constraint to the inversion problem.

Through 1959-2012, an airborne fraction (AF) of 44% of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions remained in the atmosphere, with the rest being taken up by land and ocean CO2 sinks. Understanding of this uptake is critical because it greatly alleviates the emissions reductions required for climate mitigation. An observable quantity that reflects sink properties more directly than the AF is the CO2 sink rate (kS), the combined land-ocean CO2 sink flux per unit excess atmospheric CO2 above preindustrial levels. Here we show from observations that kS declined over 1959-2012 by a factor of about 1/3, implying that CO2 sinks increased more slowly than excess CO2. We attribute the decline in kS to four mechanisms: slower-than-exponential CO2 emissions growth (~ 35% of the trend), volcanic eruptions (~ 25 %), sink responses to climate change (~ 20 %), and nonlinear responses to increasing CO2, mainly oceanic (~ 20 %). The first of these mechanisms is associated purely with extrinsic forcings, and the last two with intrinsic, nonlinear responses of sink processes to changes in climate and atmospheric CO2. Our results indicate that the effects of these intrinsic, nonlinear responses are already detectable in the global carbon cycle. Although continuing future decreases in kS will occur under all plausible CO2 emission scenarios, the rate of decline varies between scenarios in non-intuitive ways because extrinsic and intrinsic mechanisms respond in opposite ways to changes in emissions: extrinsic mechanisms cause kS to decline more strongly with increasing mitigation, while intrinsic mechanisms cause kS to decline more strongly under high-emission, low-mitigation scenarios as the carbon- climate system is perturbed further from a near-linear regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the coupling of the JULES surface model to the CCATT-BRAMS atmospheric chemistry model. This new numerical system is denominated JULES-CCATT-BRAMS. We demonstrate the performance of this new model system in relation to several meteorological variables and the CO2 mixing ratio over a large part of South America, focusing on the Amazon basin. The evaluation was conducted for two time periods, the wet (March) and dry (September) seasons of 2010. The model errors were calculated in relation to meteorological observations at conventional stations in airports and automatic stations. In addition, CO2 mixing ratios in the first model level were compared with meteorological tower measurements and vertical CO2 profiles were compared with observations obtained with airborne instruments. The results of this study show that the JULES-CCATT-BRAMS modeling system provided a significant gain in performance for the considered atmospheric fields relative to those simulated by the LEAF (version 3) surface model originally employed by CCATT-BRAMS. In addition, the new system significantly increases the ability to simulate processes involving air-surface interactions, due to the ability of JULES to simulate photosynthesis, respiration and dynamic vegetation, among other processes. We also discuss a wide range of numerical studies involving coupled atmospheric, land surface and chemistry processes that could be done with the system introduced here. Thus, this work presents to the scientific community a free modeling tool, with good performance in comparison with observational data and reanalysis model data, at least for the region and time period discussed here. Therefore, in principle, this model is able to produce atmospheric hindcast/forecast simulations at different spatial resolutions for any time period and any region of the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2000 until January 2010 vertical profiles were collected above eastern Amazonia to help determine regional-scale (∼10-10 km) fluxes of carbon cycle-related greenhouse gases. Samples were collected aboard light aircraft between the surface and 4.3 km and a column integration technique was used to determine the CO flux. Measured CO profiles were differenced from the CO background determined from measurements in the tropical Atlantic. The observed annual flux between the coast and measurement sites was 0.40 ± 0.27 gC m d (90% confidence interval using a bootstrap analysis). The wet season (January-June) mean flux was 0.44 ± 0.38 gC m d (positive fluxes defined as a source to the atmosphere) and the dry season mean flux was 0.35 ± 0.17 gC m d (July-December). The observed flux variability is high, principally in the wet season. The influence of biomass burning has been removed using co-measured CO, and revealed the presence of a significant dry season sink. The annual mean vegetation flux, after the biomass burning correction, was 0.02 ± 0.27 gC m d, and a clear sink was observed between August and November of −0.70 ± 0.21 gC m d where for all of the dry season it was −0.24 ± 0.17 gC m d. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the measurement of various atmospheric greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide at the Bialystok tower in Poland since August 2005. It says that LiCor 7000 was used to measure and analyze carbon dioxide content while Agilent 6890 gas chromatograph is used to measure methane and nitrous oxide. Results indicate that during warm season, carbon dioxide show large diurnal signals while methane and nitrous oxide show diurnal variations.

In TransCom-3 (Level 1), atmospheric CO2 measurements from 76 monitoring stations for the period 1992–1996 and 16 atmospheric transport models were used to constrain annual mean CO2 fluxes over 11 land and 11 ocean regions. The tower measurements of atmospheric CO2 from Fraserdale, a continental site in northern Ontario, Canada are now available and processed for use in the TransCom-3 inverse modelling framework. In this short study, we show that by including this set of continental CO2 data, the estimated flux for the North American boreal region becomes nearly zero, a reduction of about 0.26 Pg C yr−1 from the previous estimate. The uncertainty of the estimated flux for this region is also reduced by ∼30%. All transport models show negative changes for boreal North America, with the strongest responses shown by NIRE, NIES, CSU and SKYHI. Furthermore, models showing a strong response in boreal North America tend to show strong sensitivity in middle- and high-latitude Asian regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

abstract The use of inverse calculations to estimate surface CO2 fluxes from atmospheric concentration measurements has gained large attention in recent years. The success of an inversion will, among other factors, depend strongly on how realistically atmospheric tracer transport is represented by the employed transport model, as it links surface CO2 fluxes to modelled concentrations at the location of measurement stations. We present sensitivity studies demonstrating that transport modelling should be based on interannually varying meteorology, as compared to the traditional use of repeating a single year's winds only. Moreover, we propose an improved procedure of representing the concentration sampling in the model, which allows consistency with the measurements and uses their information content more efficiently. In further sensitivity tests, we estimate the effect of different spatial transport model resolutions and different meteorological driver data sets. Finally, we assess the quality of the inversion results with the help of independent measurements and flux estimates, and preliminarily discuss some of the resulting features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which described a three-year trace gas climatology of carbon dioxide and its stable isotopic ratios derived from regular vertical aircraft sampling over the Eurasian continent. Sampling sites and methods; Results and discussion; Conclusions.