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Anders Ahlström

Anders Ahlström

Senior lecturer

Anders Ahlström

The dry season intensity as a key driver of NPP trends

Author

  • Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo
  • Pierre Friedlingstein
  • Stephen Sitch
  • Sonia I. Seneviratne
  • Imogen Fletcher
  • Brigitte Mueller
  • Peter Greve
  • Alessandro Anav
  • Yi Liu
  • Anders Ahlström
  • Chris Huntingford
  • Sam Levis
  • Peter Levy
  • Mark Lomas
  • Benjamin Poulter
  • Nicholas Viovy
  • Sonke Zaehle
  • Ning Zeng
Show all

Summary, in English

We analyze the impacts of changing dry season length and intensity on vegetation productivity and biomass. Our results show a wetness asymmetry in dry ecosystems, with dry seasons becoming drier and wet seasons becoming wetter, likely caused by climate change. The increasingly intense dry seasons were consistently correlated with a decreasing trend in net primary productivity (NPP) and biomass from different products and could potentially mean a reduction of 10–13% in NPP by 2100. We found that annual NPP in dry ecosystems is particularly sensitive to the intensity of the dry season, whereas an increase in precipitation during the wet season has a smaller effect. We conclude that changes in water availability over the dry season affect vegetation throughout the whole year, driving changes in regional NPP. Moreover, these results suggest that usage of seasonal water fluxes is necessary to improve our understanding of the link between water availability and the land carbon cycle.

Department/s

  • Department of Biology
  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate

Publishing year

2016

Language

Swedish

Pages

2632-2639

Publication/Series

Geophysical Research Letters

Volume

43

Issue

6

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

American Geophysical Union (AGU)

Topic

  • Climate Research

Keywords

  • dry season length land carbon cycle drought 0428 Carbon cycling 1630 Impacts of global change 1655 Water cycles 1615 Biogeochemical cycles, processes, and modeling 1616 Climate variability

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1944-8007