Permafrost nitrous oxide emissions observed on a landscape scale using the airborne eddy-covariance method

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Abstract

Abstract. The microbial by-product nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas and ozone depleting substance, has conventionally been assumed to have minimal emissions in permafrost regions. This assumption has been questioned by recent in situ studies which have demonstrated that some geologic features in permafrost may, in fact, have elevated emissions comparable to those of tropical soils. However, these recent studies, along with every known in situ study focused on permafrost N2O fluxes, have used chambers to examine small areas (&lt;50&thinsp;m2). In late August 2013, we used the airborne eddy-covariance technique to make in situ N2O flux measurements over the North Slope of Alaska from a low-flying aircraft spanning a much larger area: around 310&thinsp;km2. We observed large variability of N2O fluxes with many areas exhibiting negligible emissions. Still, the daily mean averaged over our flight campaign was 3.8 (2.2–4.7)&thinsp;mg&thinsp;N2O&thinsp;m−2&thinsp;d−1 with the 90&thinsp;% confidence interval shown in parentheses. If these measurements are representative of the whole month, then the permafrost areas we observed emitted a total of around 0.04–0.09&thinsp;g&thinsp;m−2 for August, which is comparable to what is typically assumed to be the upper limit of yearly emissions for these regions.

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Nitrous oxide emissions from soils: how well do we understand the processes and their controls?

Klaus Butterbach-Bahl, Elizabeth Baggs, Michael Dannenmann … (2013)

Although it is well established that soils are the dominating source for atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O), we are still struggling to fully understand the complexity of the underlying microbial production and consumption processes and the links to biotic (e.g. inter- and intraspecies competition, food webs, plant–microbe interaction) and abiotic (e.g. soil climate, physics and chemistry) factors. Recent work shows that a better understanding of the composition and diversity of the microbial community across a variety of soils in different climates and under different land use, as well as plant–microbe interactions in the rhizosphere, may provide a key to better understand the variability of N2O fluxes at the soil–atmosphere interface. Moreover, recent insights into the regulation of the reduction of N2O to dinitrogen (N2) have increased our understanding of N2O exchange. This improved process understanding, building on the increased use of isotope tracing techniques and metagenomics, needs to go along with improvements in measurement techniques for N2O (and N2) emission in order to obtain robust field and laboratory datasets for different ecosystem types. Advances in both fields are currently used to improve process descriptions in biogeochemical models, which may eventually be used not only to test our current process understanding from the microsite to the field level, but also used as tools for up-scaling emissions to landscapes and regions and to explore feedbacks of soil N2O emissions to changes in environmental conditions, land management and land use.