Project 1 (WP1-WP3-WP4): Modeling inland water greenhouse gas fluxes
Project lead: Philippe Ciais
Post-doctoral researcher: Ronny Lauerwald
Project start/end: July 2013 – June 2015
The role of inland waters in the global carbon cycle as well as the transfer of carbon from the land to the ocean have been identified as major gaps in our understanding of the global carbon cycle. In this project, we established an estimate of CO2 fluxes between inland waters and the atmosphere at planetary scales, using data of riverine CO2 partial pressures (pCO2) and spatially explicit estimates of stream surface area and gas exchange velocity.
Our results indicate an average river outflux of 456 Tg C yr-1 (Lauerwald et al., 2015) for year 1990, mostly from low latitudes and from streams and small rivers. This work is being pursued by an explicit representation of carbon transport by rivers and streams with the land surface model ORCHIDEE.
