Impact of the 2015 El Niño on the Indonesian carbon balance: implications for carbon mitigation
Abstract
The COP21 or Paris Agreement in Dec. 2015 was a landmark step in a cooperative approach to reduce anthropogenic emissions from both fossil fuel and deforestation. During that same period, one of the strongest El Niños on record led to devastating droughts, fires, and air pollution in Indonesia. We assess the impact of this El Niño on the Indonesia carbon balance using the NASA Carbon Monitoring System Flux (CMS-Flux) pilot project, which assimilates satellite observations across the entire carbon cycle to attribute the CO2 growth rate to spatially resolved surface fluxes. We assimilate new xCO2 observations from the Orbital Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) to quantify net carbon fluxes and validate those fluxes against independent in-situ atmospheric data. The contribution of biomass burning to the carbon balance is independently determined from the assimilation of Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT). The impact of the concomitant drought on productively is assessed from the assimilation of new solar induced fluorescence (SIF) measurements. Using these multiple lines of evidence, we investigate the relative role of biomass burning and productivity in the contribution of Indonesia to the global atmospheric growth rate. The exceptionally long turnover rates of peat carbon pools lead to effectively irreversible carbon loss to the atmosphere. The implications of these losses to Indonesian Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) as part of the Paris agreement will be explored.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMGC24C..04B
- Keywords:
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- 0315 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTUREDE: 0428 Carbon cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1694 Instruments and techniques;
- GLOBAL CHANGE