Identification

Title

Global carbon budget 2017

Abstract

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) 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. CO2 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 CO2 concentration is measured directly and its rate of growth (G(ATM)) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO2 sink (S-OCEAN) and terrestrial CO2 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 sigma. 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 Nino conditions. The global atmospheric CO2 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 Quere et al., 2016, 2015b, a, 2014, 2013). All results presented here can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2017 (GCP, 2017).

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d76q20zj

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

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South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2018-03-12T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

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name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact