Impact of the 2015/2016 El Niño on the terrestrial carbon cycle constrained by bottom-up and top-down approaches

Evaluating the response of the land carbon sink to the anomalies in temperature and drought imposed by El Nino events provides insights into the present-day carbon cycle and its climate-driven variability. It is also a necessary step to build confidence in terrestrial ecosystems models' response to the warming and drying stresses expected in the future over many continents, and particularly in the tropics. Here we present an in-depth analysis of the response of the terrestrial carbon cycle to the 2015/2016 El Nino that imposed extreme warming and dry conditions in the tropics and other sensitive regions. First, we provide a synthesis of the spatiotemporal evolution of anomalies in net land-atmosphere CO2 fluxes estimated by two in situ measurements based on atmospheric inversions and 16 land-surface models (LSMs) from TRENDYv6. Simulated changes in ecosystem productivity, decomposition rates and fire emissions are also investigated. Inversions and LSMs generally agree on the decrease and subsequent recovery of the land sink in response to the onset, peak and demise of El Nino conditions and point to the decreased strength of the land carbon sink: by 0.4-0.7 PgC yr(-1) (inversions) and by 1.0 PgC yr(-1) (LSMs) during 2015/2016. LSM simulations indicate that a decrease in productivity, rather than increase in respiration, dominated the net biome productivity anomalies in response to ENSO throughout the tropics, mainly associated with prolonged drought conditions.

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Related Dataset #1 : MOD15A2H MODIS/Terra Leaf Area Index/FPAR 8-Day L4 Global 500m SIN Grid V006

Related Dataset #2 : Supplementary material from "Impact of the 2015–2016 El Nino on the terrestrial carbon cycle constrained by bottom-up and top-down approaches"
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Copyright 2018 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Author Bastos, A.
Friedlingstein, P.
Sitch, S.
Chen, C.
Mialon, A.
Wigneron, J.
Arora, V. K.
Briggs, P. R.
Canadell, J. G.
Ciais, P.
Chevallier, F.
Cheng, L.
Delire, C.
Haverd, V.
Jain, A. K.
Joos, F.
Kato, E.
Lienert, S.
Lombardozzi, Danica
Melton, J. R.
Myneni, R.
Nabel, J. E. M. S.
Pongratz, J.
Poulter, B.
Rödenbeck, C.
Séférian, R.
Tian, H.
van Eck, C.
Viovy, N.
Vuichard, N.
Walker, A. P.
Wiltshire, A.
Yang, J.
Zaehle, S.
Zeng, N.
Zhu, D.
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2018-11-19T00:00:00
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Not Assigned
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2025-07-11T19:33:20.524908
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:22034
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Bastos, A., Friedlingstein, P., Sitch, S., Chen, C., Mialon, A., Wigneron, J., Arora, V. K., Briggs, P. R., Canadell, J. G., Ciais, P., Chevallier, F., Cheng, L., Delire, C., Haverd, V., Jain, A. K., Joos, F., Kato, E., Lienert, S., Lombardozzi, Danica, Melton, J. R., Myneni, R., Nabel, J. E. M. S., Pongratz, J., Poulter, B., Rödenbeck, C., Séférian, R., Tian, H., van Eck, C., Viovy, N., Vuichard, N., Walker, A. P., Wiltshire, A., Yang, J., Zaehle, S., Zeng, N., Zhu, D.. (2018). Impact of the 2015/2016 El Niño on the terrestrial carbon cycle constrained by bottom-up and top-down approaches. UCAR/NCAR - Library. https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7gh9mvq. Accessed 13 November 2025.

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