Australia driving carbon uptake

摘要

Land and ocean take up around half of the annual anthropogenic carbon emissions, and a thorough understanding of this process is important for predicting future greenhouse-gas concentrations and thus climate change. This study investigates the largest uptake of land carbon since atmospheric CO_2 measurements began in 1958. Three independent methods of global carbon-budget determination point to a large land carbon sink in response to extraordinary La Nina rainfall in semi-arid regions in the Southern Hemisphere, with almost 60% of carbon uptake attributed to the Australian ecosystem and an increase in the sensitivity of continental net carbon uptake to precipitation.