Mean European Carbon Sink Over 2010–2015 Estimated by Simultaneous Assimilation of Atmospheric CO ₂ , Soil Moisture, and Vegetation Optical Depth

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere – the global carbon budget – is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. CO 2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry ( E FF ) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, respectively, while emissions from land-use change ( E LUC ), mainly deforestation, are based on land-cover change data and bookkeeping models. The global atmospheric CO 2 concentration is measured directly and its rate of growth ( G ATM ) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO 2 sink ( S OCEAN ) and terrestrial CO 2 sink ( S LAND ) are estimated with global process models constrained by observations. The resulting carbon budget imbalance ( B IM ), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1 σ . For the last decade available (2007–2016), E FF was 9.4 ± 0.5 GtC yr −1 , E LUC 1.3 ± 0.7 GtC yr −1 , G ATM 4.7 ± 0.1 GtC yr −1 , S OCEAN 2.4 ± 0.5 GtC yr −1 , and S LAND 3.0 ± 0.8 GtC yr −1 , with a budget imbalance B IM of 0.6 GtC yr −1 indicating overestimated emissions and/or underestimated sinks. For year 2016 alone, the growth in E FF was approximately zero and emissions remained at 9.9 ± 0.5 GtC yr −1 . Also for 2016, E LUC was 1.3 ± 0.7 GtC yr −1 , G ATM was 6.1 ± 0.2 GtC yr −1 , S OCEAN was 2.6 ± 0.5 GtC yr −1 , and S LAND was 2.7 ± 1.0 GtC yr −1 , with a small B IM of −0.3 GtC. G ATM continued to be higher in 2016 compared to the past decade (2007–2016), reflecting in part the high fossil emissions and the small S LAND consistent with El Niño conditions. The global atmospheric CO 2 concentration reached 402.8 ± 0.1 ppm averaged over 2016. For 2017, preliminary data for the first 6–9 months indicate a renewed growth in E FF of +2.0 % (range of 0.8 to 3.0 %) based on national emissions projections for China, USA, and India, and projections of gross domestic product (GDP) corrected for recent changes in the carbon intensity of the economy for the rest of the world. This living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets used in this new global carbon budget compared with previous publications of this data set (Le Quéré et al., 2016, 2015b, a, 2014, 2013). All results presented here can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2017 (GCP, 2017).

Information about regional carbon sources and sinks can be derived from variations in observed atmospheric CO2 concentrations via inverse modelling with atmospheric tracer transport models. A consensus has not yet been reached regarding the size and distribution of regional carbon fluxes obtained using this approach, partly owing to the use of several different atmospheric transport models. Here we report estimates of surface-atmosphere CO2 fluxes from an intercomparison of atmospheric CO2 inversion models (the TransCom 3 project), which includes 16 transport models and model variants. We find an uptake of CO2 in the southern extratropical ocean less than that estimated from ocean measurements, a result that is not sensitive to transport models or methodological approaches. We also find a northern land carbon sink that is distributed relatively evenly among the continents of the Northern Hemisphere, but these results show some sensitivity to transport differences among models, especially in how they respond to seasonal terrestrial exchange of CO2. Overall, carbon fluxes integrated over latitudinal zones are strongly constrained by observations in the middle to high latitudes. Further significant constraints to our understanding of regional carbon fluxes will therefore require improvements in transport models and expansion of the CO2 observation network within the tropics.