Final Report Summary - CARBONES (30-year re-analysis of CARBON fluxES and pools over Europe and the Globe)
Executive Summary:
CARBONES is a global information system that provides comprehensive information on the spatial and temporal distribution of carbon fluxes and pools over the Globe. The aim of CARBONES is to deliver, through the use of data assimilation techniques, state-of-the-art information on the history of the carbon cycle, using available observations of the terrestrial and oceanic carbon cycles: ocean surface CO2 partial pressure, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, remotely-sensed vegetation properties and in situ ecological data. The main CARBONES product takes the form of a calibrated 20 year-long reanalysis of space and time variations of carbon fluxes (3 hourly) and stocks at 1°-resolution. This reanalysis includes the surface-atmosphere CO2 fluxes (net and gross fluxes), leaf area and biomass stocks in various categories of land ecosystems. The service may serve as a benchmark for core services carbon products and provides a baseline for predicting future responses of the carbon-cycle.
The CARBONES data products and diagnostics are publicly available through a user-friendly web interface. Dissemination material and interactive visualisation tools give scientists, public organisations and the general public a general view of the living carbon cycle and allow visualisation and downloading of the CARBONES products as well as their comparison against products from independent approaches.
Project Context and Objectives:
The increasing atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is the main driver of the on-going climate change. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, CO2 concentrations have increased by 30 %, N2O by 20 %, and CH4 by 300%. These gases participate in a phenomenon called greenhouse warming in which molecules absorb thermal energy emitted by the surface and reradiate it at a lower temperature. As a result, part of the energy is trapped in the atmosphere, which leads to an increase in temperature. This natural phenomenon is accentuated as a result of human activities such as fossil fuel combustion and modifications of global vegetation through land-use change. It is now widely believed that human activities are the main driver of climate change, the effects of which are already seen through, for example, the increase in the global surface temperature over the last several decades or the shrinking of inland glaciers.
The three major components that control the contemporary carbon cycle are listed below. The exchanges between these systems are “rapid” compared to geological time scale and have an impact on the observed global warming.
- the terrestrial biosphere that can stock large amounts of carbon in the wood, leaves and soil, but with a strong climate dependency release in a relatively short time scale;
- the ocean system, a much larger reservoir that store on average one fourth of the anthropogenic emission of carbon;
- the atmosphere, which transports greenhouse gases from source to sink regions. Due to a prolonged imbalance in sources and sinks, the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased, thus leading to climate change.
On an average, only half of the CO2 from anthropogenic emissions has remained in the atmosphere until now. The land and oceans have sequestered the other half, in approximately equal proportions. However, the apportionment of carbon fluxes between ocean and land varies in time and space, and continental sources are particularly heterogeneous.
The present quantification of CO2 sources and sinks is based on inventories of forest biomass and on energy statistics. This pragmatic quantification is too simple to correctly represent the atmospheric signatures of CO2 variability. Detailed information on CO2 fluxes and carbon pools, under the form of well resolved maps and their variabilities, are necessary. This need is expressed both by the members of the climate modelling community who want to understand and quantify the carbon cycles at global and regional scales, and by policy makers who want to make well-informed decisions on CO2 emissions at regional and local scales.
These gases participate in a phenomenon called greenhouse warming in which molecules absorb thermal energy emitted by the surface and reradiate it at a lower temperature. As a result, part of the energy is trapped in the atmosphere, which leads to an increase in temperature. This natural phenomenon is accentuated as a result of human activities such as fossil fuel combustion and modifications of global vegetation through land-use change. It is now widely believed that human activities are the main driver of climate change, the effects of which are already seen through, for example, the increase in the global surface temperature over the last several decades or the shrinking of inland glaciers.
The objective of the CARBONES project is to use most of the available measurements as well as state-of-the-art modelling tools to improve our knowledge about:
- the stocks of carbon in living biomass and in soil;
- the rapid exchanges of carbon (called fluxes) between the 3 components of the carbon system.
The scientists and engineers involved in the CARBONES project have provided a calibrated 20 year-long record of space and time variations of carbon fluxes and pools over the Earth. The record is consistent with most available in situ and satellite observations, as well as with the current understanding of the physical processes that drive the carbon cycle and which are represented in a mathematical form in the models.
Project Results:
S&T results/foregrounds are attached in the .pdf file "CARBONES S&T results" since special characters (mathematics) that cannot be reproduced in this box are required.
Potential Impact:
1 Potential impact
The strategic areas where CARBONES project has a potential impact include:
• contribution to the establishment of a data archive of systematic observation data related to the climate system, for a continuous record of essential climate variables coherent with UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) requirements;
• contribution to the increasing of the consistency of such a data set, as well as to a sustainable and transparent access to such data for global climate scientific and operational communities;
• improvement of the structure and coordination of the entities involved in the processing and delivery of climate change relevant dataset, in order to avoid dispersion and duplication of activities and to pave the way for a sustainable provision compliant with the requirements of climate analysis communities;
• contribution to build a comprehensive global carbon core service, based on model data fusion completing the existing initiative with the inclusion of all major carbon related data streams.
By providing a firm baseline for the carbon stocks in Europe, CARBONES will give a firm basis for reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
CARBONES also provides a clear and necessary added value to GMES Core Services with respect to Climate Users needs. The examples of benchmarking of the GMES Core Servics products (MACC 2, Geoland 2) were provided in the project. The CARBONES products are tailored to be used by the IPCC climate modellers for testing and improving their simulations of the future evolution of the coupled climate-carbon cycle system. Examples of such comparisons as well as of the improvement of the simulations with an optimised set of parameters (for ORCHIDEE) consistent with available observations were provided in the project.
CARBONES reanalysis, which are consistent with available observational datastreams, bring new information for scientists and policy makers on the carbon cycle in terms of carbon fluxes and carbon stocks at several spatial and temporal scales. The products contain information on the:
• The global net annual carbon balance by apportioning between key regions of the globe like North America, Europe, North Eurasia, the Tropics and key ocean basins,
• The inter-annual variability of the sub-continental regions and ocean basins,
• The trend in the net carbon uptake of the lands in comparison with that of the oceans,
• The spatial distribution of the forest carbon stocks compared with “observations” mapped globally (produced by CARBONES).
Finally, CARBONES provides a detailed analysis of the potential of multi-data-streams to constraint the carbon cycle with a model – data fusion approach. It highlights the benefits and complementarities of ocean surface pCO2 data, FluxNet measurements and remote sensing vegetation indexes, to the conventional atmospheric CO2 data that are used in MACC-II core service. It also analyses the difficulties linked to a simultaneous assimilation of these data streams and provides practical approaches to circumvent these difficulties (stepwise approach).
2 Dissemination and exploitation of the results
Since one of the main objectives of CARBONES was to provide data and analysis to the climate community and the policy makers, the dissemination of results and gained knowledge was critical to the overall success of the project. The dissemination of the results was undertaken at the very beginning of the project through the establishment of the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) set up to advise the project on the strategic choices. A larger Climate User Advisory Group (CUAG) was also set up with the objective to advise the project partners on the system specifications assuring that the generated products met the needs of the scientific community. Building on the success of the CUAG meetings, a similar group containing also experts from the private and other non-scientific areas was formed and consulted by holding a dedicated User Workshop.
In addition a number of dissemination vectors, listed below, were made available in order to deliver, present and explain the CARBONES products.
The main tool for disseminating CARBONES products and diagnostics is a tailored user-friendly web interface (http://www.carbones.eu/). A considerable effort was extended by the consortium in order to include a high number of functionalities responding to users’ needs and to make the portal attractive from the visual and ergonomic point of view. The final version allows visualising the maps and time series of the products, comparing the CARBONES product with MACC-2 and other independent products, downloading data, exporting the graphs to GoogleEarth.
The CARBONES Portal will be maintained by the consortium for at least several years after the end of the project providing the continuity to the CARBONES service. In addition, the portal will continue to be used for displaying: i) future versions of the CARBONES datasets (including an ongoing CARBONES reanalysis that will be ready shortly after the end of the project) and ii) additional independent products (for validation /evaluation). Finally the LSCE partner is studying the possibility to re-use the framework of such portal within a related on-going EU-FP7 project: GEOCARBON.
The portal gives access to other numerous dissemination tools and documents prepared by the consortium such as:
• A document that provides information on the CARBONES products and services. The goal of this document is to give potential users a rapid overview of the available visualisation and downloading tools. It provides also a description of the available products as well as the description of the methodology used to generate these data. The goal of this description is to provide expert users with information on the assumptions and methods used in generation of the products in order to enable a proper interpretation of these data.
• Tools for evaluating the quality of the data displayed on the CARBONES webpage through a comparison with independent products from the MACC and Geoland core services as well as other model approaches.
• A presentation directed to a general public that explains in simple terms the context of the project, the project’s objectives and proposes a guided tour, under the form of videos, of the two main visualisation tools used to show the CARBONES products: the maps and the time-series. The presentation contains as well several questions with corresponding answers which allow interested users to test to into more depth on several key issues of the carbon cycle.
• CARBONES presentation portfolio with a more detailed presentation of the project including a description of the models, of the input datastreams and of the selected products (menu : Dissemination, tab: Deliverables, CARBONES Presentation link in the upper right part of the page);
• a short leaflet generated to the general public (menu: Dissemination, tab: Deliverables, CARBONES Flyer link in the upper right part of the page).
• The executive summary for policy makers. It contains a synthetic summary of the project and a description of Added Value of the CARBONES project.
List of Websites:
www.carbones.eu
Contact: Pascal.Prunet Coordinator: carbones@noveltis.fr - Philippe Peylin, Scientific Coordinator: peylin@lsce.ipsl.fr
CARBONES is a global information system that provides comprehensive information on the spatial and temporal distribution of carbon fluxes and pools over the Globe. The aim of CARBONES is to deliver, through the use of data assimilation techniques, state-of-the-art information on the history of the carbon cycle, using available observations of the terrestrial and oceanic carbon cycles: ocean surface CO2 partial pressure, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, remotely-sensed vegetation properties and in situ ecological data. The main CARBONES product takes the form of a calibrated 20 year-long reanalysis of space and time variations of carbon fluxes (3 hourly) and stocks at 1°-resolution. This reanalysis includes the surface-atmosphere CO2 fluxes (net and gross fluxes), leaf area and biomass stocks in various categories of land ecosystems. The service may serve as a benchmark for core services carbon products and provides a baseline for predicting future responses of the carbon-cycle.
The CARBONES data products and diagnostics are publicly available through a user-friendly web interface. Dissemination material and interactive visualisation tools give scientists, public organisations and the general public a general view of the living carbon cycle and allow visualisation and downloading of the CARBONES products as well as their comparison against products from independent approaches.
Project Context and Objectives:
The increasing atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is the main driver of the on-going climate change. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, CO2 concentrations have increased by 30 %, N2O by 20 %, and CH4 by 300%. These gases participate in a phenomenon called greenhouse warming in which molecules absorb thermal energy emitted by the surface and reradiate it at a lower temperature. As a result, part of the energy is trapped in the atmosphere, which leads to an increase in temperature. This natural phenomenon is accentuated as a result of human activities such as fossil fuel combustion and modifications of global vegetation through land-use change. It is now widely believed that human activities are the main driver of climate change, the effects of which are already seen through, for example, the increase in the global surface temperature over the last several decades or the shrinking of inland glaciers.
The three major components that control the contemporary carbon cycle are listed below. The exchanges between these systems are “rapid” compared to geological time scale and have an impact on the observed global warming.
- the terrestrial biosphere that can stock large amounts of carbon in the wood, leaves and soil, but with a strong climate dependency release in a relatively short time scale;
- the ocean system, a much larger reservoir that store on average one fourth of the anthropogenic emission of carbon;
- the atmosphere, which transports greenhouse gases from source to sink regions. Due to a prolonged imbalance in sources and sinks, the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased, thus leading to climate change.
On an average, only half of the CO2 from anthropogenic emissions has remained in the atmosphere until now. The land and oceans have sequestered the other half, in approximately equal proportions. However, the apportionment of carbon fluxes between ocean and land varies in time and space, and continental sources are particularly heterogeneous.
The present quantification of CO2 sources and sinks is based on inventories of forest biomass and on energy statistics. This pragmatic quantification is too simple to correctly represent the atmospheric signatures of CO2 variability. Detailed information on CO2 fluxes and carbon pools, under the form of well resolved maps and their variabilities, are necessary. This need is expressed both by the members of the climate modelling community who want to understand and quantify the carbon cycles at global and regional scales, and by policy makers who want to make well-informed decisions on CO2 emissions at regional and local scales.
These gases participate in a phenomenon called greenhouse warming in which molecules absorb thermal energy emitted by the surface and reradiate it at a lower temperature. As a result, part of the energy is trapped in the atmosphere, which leads to an increase in temperature. This natural phenomenon is accentuated as a result of human activities such as fossil fuel combustion and modifications of global vegetation through land-use change. It is now widely believed that human activities are the main driver of climate change, the effects of which are already seen through, for example, the increase in the global surface temperature over the last several decades or the shrinking of inland glaciers.
The objective of the CARBONES project is to use most of the available measurements as well as state-of-the-art modelling tools to improve our knowledge about:
- the stocks of carbon in living biomass and in soil;
- the rapid exchanges of carbon (called fluxes) between the 3 components of the carbon system.
The scientists and engineers involved in the CARBONES project have provided a calibrated 20 year-long record of space and time variations of carbon fluxes and pools over the Earth. The record is consistent with most available in situ and satellite observations, as well as with the current understanding of the physical processes that drive the carbon cycle and which are represented in a mathematical form in the models.
Project Results:
S&T results/foregrounds are attached in the .pdf file "CARBONES S&T results" since special characters (mathematics) that cannot be reproduced in this box are required.
Potential Impact:
1 Potential impact
The strategic areas where CARBONES project has a potential impact include:
• contribution to the establishment of a data archive of systematic observation data related to the climate system, for a continuous record of essential climate variables coherent with UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) requirements;
• contribution to the increasing of the consistency of such a data set, as well as to a sustainable and transparent access to such data for global climate scientific and operational communities;
• improvement of the structure and coordination of the entities involved in the processing and delivery of climate change relevant dataset, in order to avoid dispersion and duplication of activities and to pave the way for a sustainable provision compliant with the requirements of climate analysis communities;
• contribution to build a comprehensive global carbon core service, based on model data fusion completing the existing initiative with the inclusion of all major carbon related data streams.
By providing a firm baseline for the carbon stocks in Europe, CARBONES will give a firm basis for reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
CARBONES also provides a clear and necessary added value to GMES Core Services with respect to Climate Users needs. The examples of benchmarking of the GMES Core Servics products (MACC 2, Geoland 2) were provided in the project. The CARBONES products are tailored to be used by the IPCC climate modellers for testing and improving their simulations of the future evolution of the coupled climate-carbon cycle system. Examples of such comparisons as well as of the improvement of the simulations with an optimised set of parameters (for ORCHIDEE) consistent with available observations were provided in the project.
CARBONES reanalysis, which are consistent with available observational datastreams, bring new information for scientists and policy makers on the carbon cycle in terms of carbon fluxes and carbon stocks at several spatial and temporal scales. The products contain information on the:
• The global net annual carbon balance by apportioning between key regions of the globe like North America, Europe, North Eurasia, the Tropics and key ocean basins,
• The inter-annual variability of the sub-continental regions and ocean basins,
• The trend in the net carbon uptake of the lands in comparison with that of the oceans,
• The spatial distribution of the forest carbon stocks compared with “observations” mapped globally (produced by CARBONES).
Finally, CARBONES provides a detailed analysis of the potential of multi-data-streams to constraint the carbon cycle with a model – data fusion approach. It highlights the benefits and complementarities of ocean surface pCO2 data, FluxNet measurements and remote sensing vegetation indexes, to the conventional atmospheric CO2 data that are used in MACC-II core service. It also analyses the difficulties linked to a simultaneous assimilation of these data streams and provides practical approaches to circumvent these difficulties (stepwise approach).
2 Dissemination and exploitation of the results
Since one of the main objectives of CARBONES was to provide data and analysis to the climate community and the policy makers, the dissemination of results and gained knowledge was critical to the overall success of the project. The dissemination of the results was undertaken at the very beginning of the project through the establishment of the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG) set up to advise the project on the strategic choices. A larger Climate User Advisory Group (CUAG) was also set up with the objective to advise the project partners on the system specifications assuring that the generated products met the needs of the scientific community. Building on the success of the CUAG meetings, a similar group containing also experts from the private and other non-scientific areas was formed and consulted by holding a dedicated User Workshop.
In addition a number of dissemination vectors, listed below, were made available in order to deliver, present and explain the CARBONES products.
The main tool for disseminating CARBONES products and diagnostics is a tailored user-friendly web interface (http://www.carbones.eu/). A considerable effort was extended by the consortium in order to include a high number of functionalities responding to users’ needs and to make the portal attractive from the visual and ergonomic point of view. The final version allows visualising the maps and time series of the products, comparing the CARBONES product with MACC-2 and other independent products, downloading data, exporting the graphs to GoogleEarth.
The CARBONES Portal will be maintained by the consortium for at least several years after the end of the project providing the continuity to the CARBONES service. In addition, the portal will continue to be used for displaying: i) future versions of the CARBONES datasets (including an ongoing CARBONES reanalysis that will be ready shortly after the end of the project) and ii) additional independent products (for validation /evaluation). Finally the LSCE partner is studying the possibility to re-use the framework of such portal within a related on-going EU-FP7 project: GEOCARBON.
The portal gives access to other numerous dissemination tools and documents prepared by the consortium such as:
• A document that provides information on the CARBONES products and services. The goal of this document is to give potential users a rapid overview of the available visualisation and downloading tools. It provides also a description of the available products as well as the description of the methodology used to generate these data. The goal of this description is to provide expert users with information on the assumptions and methods used in generation of the products in order to enable a proper interpretation of these data.
• Tools for evaluating the quality of the data displayed on the CARBONES webpage through a comparison with independent products from the MACC and Geoland core services as well as other model approaches.
• A presentation directed to a general public that explains in simple terms the context of the project, the project’s objectives and proposes a guided tour, under the form of videos, of the two main visualisation tools used to show the CARBONES products: the maps and the time-series. The presentation contains as well several questions with corresponding answers which allow interested users to test to into more depth on several key issues of the carbon cycle.
• CARBONES presentation portfolio with a more detailed presentation of the project including a description of the models, of the input datastreams and of the selected products (menu : Dissemination, tab: Deliverables, CARBONES Presentation link in the upper right part of the page);
• a short leaflet generated to the general public (menu: Dissemination, tab: Deliverables, CARBONES Flyer link in the upper right part of the page).
• The executive summary for policy makers. It contains a synthetic summary of the project and a description of Added Value of the CARBONES project.
List of Websites:
www.carbones.eu
Contact: Pascal.Prunet Coordinator: carbones@noveltis.fr - Philippe Peylin, Scientific Coordinator: peylin@lsce.ipsl.fr
