Exploring Natural Climate Solutions: Could flux towers be useful at industrial scales?
Abstract
This year has presented impressive extreme events, from heat domes to floods and wildfires affecting communities across the globe. While climate change has long been forecasted to fuel extreme events, the frequency and magnitude of natural disasters still came as a rude awakening. This years AGU theme Science is Society presents an opportunity to explore avenues for the flux community to play an active role in applied climate change mitigation. Atmospheric CO2 removal is part of nearly all net-zero pathways to tackle climate change. Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) provide one such avenue, through reforestation, improved management of forests, cropland and rangeland, and wetland restoration. NCS projects are organized around carbon financial markets and offer revenue streams. The traditional project-scale NCS quantification approach relies on periodic inventory of aboveground biomass and differencing from a projected baseline. The flux community has several opportunities to enhance accessibility (financial, geographical, societal) and robustness (reproducibility, validation, sustainability). Here, we leverage synergies among AmeriFlux, CHEESEHEAD19 and NEON initiatives to explore flux tower technology transfer from academia to the industrial scales needed to effectively contribute to NCS-based climate change mitigation. We use the CHEESEHEAD19 (https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0346.1) 100 km2 high-density dataset to investigate benefit-cost ratios (BCR) of flux tower, remote sensing, data fusion and benchmarking contributions to NCS. Projected to the year 2030, inventory-based NCS offer a BCR of 140% with considerable risk of not meeting envisioned CO2 removals. Airborne remote sensing could aid robustness of aboveground biomass monitoring at an attractive 500% < BCR < 1000%, but neglect persistent pools such as soil carbon. Flux towers could rectify this situation through directly observing CO2 net ecosystem exchange and resulting process insights, albeit at a BCR of only 63% (N=11). In summary, no individual method is whole by itself. We report work towards accessibility and robustness through flux tower data fusion that harnesses complementary observation attributes and empowers the flux community to an active role in climate change mitigation and combating extreme events.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFM.B14D..08M