Imperial College London
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Professor Iain Colin Prentice

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park)

Chair in Biosphere and Climate Impacts
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 2482c.prentice

 
 
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Location

 

2.3Centre for Population BiologySilwood Park

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Harrison:2018:10.5194/esd-9-663-2018,
author = {Harrison, SP and Bartlein, PJ and Brovkin, V and Houweling, S and Kloster, S and Prentice, IC},
doi = {10.5194/esd-9-663-2018},
journal = {Earth System Dynamics},
pages = {663--677},
title = {The biomass burning contribution to climate-carbon-cycle feedback},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-663-2018},
volume = {9},
year = {2018}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Temperature exerts strong controls on the incidence and severity of fire. All else equal, warming is expected to increase fire-related carbon emissions, and thereby atmospheric CO2. But the magnitude of this feedback is very poorly known. We use a single-box model of the land biosphere to quantify this positive feedback from satellite-based estimates of biomass burning emissions for 2000–2014CE and from sedimentary charcoal records for the millennium before the industrial period. We derive an estimate of the centennial-scale feedback strength of 6.5±3.4ppmCO2 per degree of land temperature increase, based on the satellite data. However, this estimate is poorly constrained, and is largely driven by the well-documented dependence of tropical deforestation and peat fires (primarily anthropogenic) on climate variability patterns linked to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. Palaeo-data from pre-industrial times provide the opportunity to assess the fire-related climate–carbon-cycle feedback over a longer period, with less pervasive human impacts. Past biomass burning can be quantified based on variations in either the concentration and isotopic composition of methane in ice cores (with assumptions about the isotopic signatures of different methane sources) or the abundances of charcoal preserved in sediments, which reflect landscape-scale changes in burnt biomass. These two data sources are shown here to be coherent with one another. The more numerous data from sedimentary charcoal, expressed as normalized anomalies (fractional deviations from the long-term mean), are then used – together with an estimate of mean biomass burning derived from methane isotope data – to infer a feedback strength of 5.6±3.2ppmCO2 per degree of land temperature and (for a climate sensitivity of 2.8K) a gain of 0.09±0.05. This finding indicates that the positive carbon cycle feedback from increased fire provides a substantial
AU  - Harrison,SP
AU  - Bartlein,PJ
AU  - Brovkin,V
AU  - Houweling,S
AU  - Kloster,S
AU  - Prentice,IC
DO  - 10.5194/esd-9-663-2018
EP  - 677
PY  - 2018///
SN  - 2190-4979
SP  - 663
TI  - The biomass burning contribution to climate-carbon-cycle feedback
T2  - Earth System Dynamics
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-663-2018
UR  - http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000433221600001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/60943
VL  - 9
ER  -
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