The importance of interacting climate modes on Australia’s contribution to global carbon cycle extremes

The global carbon cycle is highly sensitive to climate-driven fluctuations of precipitation, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. This was clearly manifested by a 20% increase of the global terrestrial C sink in 2011 during the strongest sustained La Niña since 1917. However, inconsistencies exist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2016-03, Vol.6 (1), p.23113, Article 23113
Main Authors: Cleverly, James, Eamus, Derek, Luo, Qunying, Restrepo Coupe, Natalia, Kljun, Natascha, Ma, Xuanlong, Ewenz, Cacilia, Li, Longhui, Yu, Qiang, Huete, Alfredo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
704/106/242
704/106/35/823
704/106/47/4113
Arid environments
Carbon cycle
Climate
Climate effects
Drought
El Nino
Extreme weather
Flora
Fluctuations
Humanities and Social Sciences
La Nina
multidisciplinary
Precipitation
Scaling
Science
Vegetation
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Summary:The global carbon cycle is highly sensitive to climate-driven fluctuations of precipitation, especially in the Southern Hemisphere. This was clearly manifested by a 20% increase of the global terrestrial C sink in 2011 during the strongest sustained La Niña since 1917. However, inconsistencies exist between El Niño/La Niña (ENSO) cycles and precipitation in the historical record; for example, significant ENSO–precipitation correlations were present in only 31% of the last 100 years, and often absent in wet years. To resolve these inconsistencies, we used an advanced temporal scaling method for identifying interactions amongst three key climate modes (El Niño, the Indian Ocean dipole, and the southern annular mode). When these climate modes synchronised (1999–2012), drought and extreme precipitation were observed across Australia. The interaction amongst these climate modes, more than the effect of any single mode, was associated with large fluctuations in precipitation and productivity. The long-term exposure of vegetation to this arid environment has favoured a resilient flora capable of large fluctuations in photosynthetic productivity and explains why Australia was a major contributor not only to the 2011 global C sink anomaly but also to global reductions in photosynthetic C uptake during the previous decade of drought.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/srep23113