Quantifying Climate Feedbacks from Abrupt Changes in High-Latitude Trace-Gas Emissions

• Main Author: Zhuang, Qianlai
• Other Authors: United States. Department of Energy.
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Purdue University 2012
• Subjects: 54 Environmental Sciences; Arctic; Arctic Basin; Siberia
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2172/1054888; http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc828865/

During the three-year project period, Purdue University has specifically accomplished the following: revised the existing Methane Dynamics Model (MDM) to consider the effects of changes of atmospheric pressure; applied the methane dynamics model (MDM) to Siberian region to demonstrate that ebullition estimates could increase previous estimates of regional terrestrial CH{sub 4} emissions 3- to 7-fold in Siberia; Conducted an analysis of the carbon balance of the Arctic Basin from 1997 to 2006 to show that terrestrial areas of the Arctic were a net source of 41.5 Tg CH{sub 4} yr{sup −1} that increased by 0.6 Tg CH{sub 4} yr{sup −1} during the decade of analysis, a magnitude that is comparable with an atmospheric inversion of CH{sub 4}; improved the quantification of CH{sub 4} fluxes in the Arctic with inversion methods; evaluated AIRS CH4 retrieval data with a transport and inversion model and surface flux and aircraft data; to better quantify methane emissions from wetlands, we extended the MDM within a biogeochemistry model, the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (TEM), to include a large-scale hydrology model, the variable infiltration capacity (VIC) model; more recently, we developed a single box atmospheric chemistry model involving atmospheric methane (CH{sub 4}), carbon monoxide (CO) and radical hydroxyl (OH) to analyze atmospheric CH{sub 4} concentrations from 1984 to 2008.