References

Biogeosciences

1726-4189

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/bg-10-851-2013

The Australian terrestrial carbon budget

Haverd

¹ Raupach

M. R.

¹ Briggs

P. R.

¹ J. G. Canadell.

¹ Davis

S. J.

² Law

R. M.

³ Meyer

C. P.

³ Peters

G. P.

⁴ Pickett-Heaps

¹ Sherman

⁵

CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, P.O. Box 3023, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia

University of California, Irvine, Dept. of Earth System Science, CA, USA

CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, PB1, Aspendale, Victoria 3195, Australia

Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo (CICERO), P. B. 1129 Blindern, 0318 Oslo, Norway

CSIRO Land and Water, P.O. Box 1666, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia

07 02 2013

10 2 851 869

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article is available from http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/851/2013/bg-10-851-2013.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.biogeosciences.net/10/851/2013/bg-10-851-2013.pdf

This paper reports a study of the full carbon (C-CO2) budget of the Australian continent, focussing on 1990–2011 in the context of estimates over two centuries. The work is a contribution to the RECCAP (REgional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes) project, as one of numerous regional studies. In constructing the budget, we estimate the following component carbon fluxes: net primary production (NPP); net ecosystem production (NEP); fire; land use change (LUC); riverine export; dust export; harvest (wood, crop and livestock) and fossil fuel emissions (both territorial and non-territorial). Major biospheric fluxes were derived using BIOS2 (Haverd et al., 2012), a fine-spatial-resolution (0.05°) offline modelling environment in which predictions of CABLE (Wang et al., 2011), a sophisticated land surface model with carbon cycle, are constrained by multiple observation types. The mean NEP reveals that climate variability and rising CO2 contributed 12 &pm; 24 (1σ error on mean) and 68 &pm; 15 TgC yr−1, respectively. However these gains were partially offset by fire and LUC (along with other minor fluxes), which caused net losses of 26 &pm; 4 TgC yr−1 and 18 &pm; 7 TgC yr−1, respectively. The resultant net biome production (NBP) is 36 &pm; 29 TgC yr−1, in which the largest contributions to uncertainty are NEP, fire and LUC. This NBP offset fossil fuel emissions (95 &pm; 6 TgC yr−1) by 38 &pm; 30%. The interannual variability (IAV) in the Australian carbon budget exceeds Australia's total carbon emissions by fossil fuel combustion and is dominated by IAV in NEP. Territorial fossil fuel emissions are significantly smaller than the rapidly growing fossil fuel exports: in 2009–2010, Australia exported 2.5 times more carbon in fossil fuels than it emitted by burning fossil fuels.

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