• Energy Research
• ES close

Abstract. As a result of climate change warmer temperatures are projected through the 21st century and are already increasing above modelled predictions. Apart from increases in the mean, warm/hot temperature extremes are expected to become more prevalent in the future, along with an increase in the frequency of droughts. It is crucial to better understand the response of terrestrial ecosystems to such temperature extremes for predicting land-surface feedbacks in a changing climate. While land-surface feedbacks in drought conditions and during heat waves have been reported from Europe and the US, direct observations of the impact of such extremes on the carbon and water cycles in Australia have been lacking. During the 2012/2013 summer, Australia experienced a record-breaking heat wave with an exceptional spatial extent that lasted for several weeks. In this study we synthesised eddy-covariance measurements from seven woodlands and one forest site across three biogeographic regions in southern Australia. These observations were combined with model results from BIOS2 (Haverd et al., 2013a, b) to investigate the effect of the summer heat wave on the carbon and water exchange of terrestrial ecosystems which are known for their resilience toward hot and dry conditions. We found that water-limited woodland and energy-limited forest ecosystems responded differently to the heat wave. During the most intense part of the heat wave, the woodlands experienced decreased latent heat flux (23 % of background value), increased Bowen ratio (154 %) and reduced carbon uptake (60 %). At the same time the forest ecosystem showed increased latent heat flux (151 %), reduced Bowen ratio (19 %) and increased carbon uptake (112 %). Higher temperatures caused increased ecosystem respiration at all sites (up to 139 %). During daytime all ecosystems remained carbon sinks, but carbon uptake was reduced in magnitude. The number of hours during which the ecosystem acted as a carbon sink was also reduced, which switched the woodlands into a carbon source on a daily average. Precipitation occurred after the first, most intense part of the heat wave, and the subsequent cooler temperatures in the temperate woodlands led to recovery of the carbon sink, decreased the Bowen ratio (65 %) and hence increased evaporative cooling. Gross primary productivity in the woodlands recovered quickly with precipitation and cooler temperatures but respiration remained high. While the forest proved relatively resilient to this short-term heat extreme the response of the woodlands is the first direct evidence that the carbon sinks of large areas of Australia may not be sustainable in a future climate with an increased number, intensity and duration of heat waves.

The latent heat flux (LE) between the terrestrial biosphere and atmosphere is a major driver of the global hydrological cycle. In this study, we evaluated LE simulations by 45 general circulation models (GCMs) in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) by a comparison with eddy covariance (EC) observations from 240 globally distributed sites from 2000 to 2009. In addition, we improved global terrestrial LE estimates for different land cover types by synthesis of seven best CMIP5 models and EC observations based on a Bayesian model averaging (BMA) method. The comparison results showed substantial differences in monthly LE among all GCMs. The model CESM1-CAM5 has the best performance with the highest predictive skill and a Taylor skill score (S) from 0.51–0.75 for different land cover types. The cross-validation results illustrate that the BMA method has improved the accuracy of the CMIP5 GCM’s LE simulation with a decrease in the averaged root-mean-square error (RMSE) by more than 3 W/m2 when compared to the simple model averaging (SMA) method and individual GCMs. We found an increasing trend in the BMA-based global terrestrial LE (slope of 0.018 W/m2 yr−1, p < 0.05) during the period 1970–2005. This variation may be attributed directly to the inter-annual variations in air temperature (Ta), surface incident solar radiation (Rs) and precipitation (P). However, our study highlights a large difference from previous studies in a continuous increasing trend after 1998, which may be caused by the combined effects of the variations of Rs, Ta, and P on LE for different models on these time scales. This study provides corrected-modeling evidence for an accelerated global water cycle with climate change.

AbstractThe FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their data to create global datasets. Data were quality controlled and processed using uniform methods, to improve consistency and intercomparability across sites. The dataset is already being used in a number of applications, including ecophysiology studies, remote sensing studies, and development of ecosystem and Earth system models. FLUXNET2015 includes derived-data products, such as gap-filled time series, ecosystem respiration and photosynthetic uptake estimates, estimation of uncertainties, and metadata about the measurements, presented for the first time in this paper. In addition, 206 of these sites are for the first time distributed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. This paper details this enhanced dataset and the processing methods, now made available as open-source codes, making the dataset more accessible, transparent, and reproducible.