Reconstructions and predictions of the global carbon cycle with an
emission-driven Earth System Model
Abstract
The global carbon budget including fluxes of CO2 between atmosphere,
land and ocean, and its atmospheric growth rate show large interannual
to decadal variations. Yet, these variations are poorly represented in
uninitialized simulations. In a novel approach we reconstruct and
predict the global carbon cycle with the decadal prediction system based
on the Max Planck Institute Earth system model (MPI-ESM) extended with
an interactive carbon cycle. By assimilating atmospheric and oceanic
data products into the MPI-ESM, we can well reproduce historical global
carbon budget variations with high correlations relative to the
assessments from the global carbon project of 0.75, 0.75 and 0.97 for
atmospheric CO2 growth, air-land CO2 fluxes and air-sea CO2 fluxes,
respectively. Retrospective predictions initializing from the
assimilation simulation show the predictive skill of the air-sea CO2
fluxes up to 5 years, and the air-land CO2 fluxes and atmospheric carbon
growth rate of 2 years.