Climate-CH₄ feedback from wetlands and its interaction with the climate-CO₂ feedback

• Main Authors: B. Decharme, N. de Noblet-Ducoudré, P. Ciais, C. Koven, P. Friedlingstein, B. Ringeval, P. Cadule
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2011-08-01
• Series: Biogeosciences
• Online Access: http://www.biogeosciences.net/8/2137/2011/bg-8-2137-2011.pdf
• ISSN: 1726-4170; 1726-4189

The existence of a feedback between climate and methane (CH₄) emissions from wetlands has previously been hypothesized, but both its sign and amplitude remain unknown. Moreover, this feedback could interact with the climate-CO₂ cycle feedback, which has not yet been accounted for at the global scale. These interactions relate to (i) the effect of atmospheric CO₂ on methanogenic substrates by virtue of its fertilizing effect on plant productivity and (ii) the fact that a climate perturbation due to CO₂ (respectively CH₄) radiative forcing has an effect on wetland CH₄ emissions (respectively CO₂ fluxes at the surface/atmosphere interface). <br><br> We present a theoretical analysis of these interactions, which makes it possible to express the magnitude of the feedback for CO₂ and CH₄ alone, the additional gain due to interactions between these two feedbacks and the effects of these feedbacks on the difference in atmospheric CH₄ and CO₂ between 2100 and pre-industrial time (respectively ΔCH₄ and ΔCO₂). These gains are expressed as functions of different sensitivity terms, which we estimate based on prior studies and from experiments performed with the global terrestrial vegetation model ORCHIDEE. <br><br> Despite high uncertainties on the sensitivity of wetland CH₄ emissions to climate, we found that the absolute value of the gain of the climate-CH₄ feedback from wetlands is relatively low (<30 % of climate-CO₂ feedback gain), with either negative or positive sign within the range of estimates. Whereas the interactions between the two feedbacks have low influence on ΔCO₂, the ΔCH₄ could increase by 475 to 1400 ppb based on the sign of the C-CH₄ feedback gain. <br><br> Our study suggests that it is necessary to better constrain the evolution of wetland area under future climate change as well as the local coupling through methanogenesis substrate of the carbon and CH₄ cycles – in particular the magnitude of the CO₂ fertilization effect on the wetland CH₄ emissions – as these are the dominant sources of uncertainty in our model.