USGCRP Home  Research Elements & Cross-cutting Activites The Global Carbon Cycle |
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| USGCRP Home Research Elements & Cross-cutting Activites The Global Carbon Cycle |
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The Global Carbon CycleOverview Archived News Postings [June 2000 - July 2005] CCSP / USGCRP Carbon Cycle Working Group Members
Carbon Cycle Science Home Page
The Carbon Cycle. Basic background information from NASA's Earth Observatory Reference section.
Human Interactions with the Carbon
Cycle. Summary of a Workshop. |
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The U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program is clarifying the changes, magnitudes, and distributions of carbon sources and sinks; the fluxes between the major terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric carbon reservoirs; and the underlying mechanisms involved including human activities, fossil-fuel emissions, land use, and climate. Program scientists are now beginning to reveal and quantify some of the intricate complexities of and interactions between the Earth's carbon reservoirs and climate. The Carbon Cycle Science Program engages many science disciplines and extends over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. Many Federal agencies coordinate and support the activities included under the North American Carbon Program (NACP) and the Ocean Carbon and Climate Change (OCCC) program. In FY 2008, the integration of the terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric investigations will be critical and will continue as a priority of the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Program. Assimilation of carbon data into models is developing at scales from regional to global as an important means of incorporating observations into carbon cycle analyses. The goal is to develop increasingly realistic, fully coupled carbon cycle-climate models to provide insight into potential feedbacks between and drivers of these major Earth systems.
Looking beyond FY 2008, the research element will extend its observation and network systems to high latitudes and other undersampled regions of the world. The anticipated emphasis on high-latitude research will provide critical scientific information on the carbon dynamics of the undersampled regions of North America and adjacent oceans, Antarctica, and the Southern Ocean as high-latitude warming changes system dynamics. Collaborations with Canada and Mexico under the Joint NACP (Canada, Mexico, and the United States) cooperative will be well underway. Efforts are also underway to initiate stronger international collaborations with the European Union and its research program under the CarboEurope and CarboOcean Programs. Other international initiatives and collaborations are also expected to address regional to global issues, interactions between carbon cycle dynamics and global climate change, linkages between and feedbacks within Earth systems, and the uncertainties associated with continental and oceanic carbon sources and sinks.
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Increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 are major drivers of climate change. The global carbon cycle element of the CCSP seeks to better quantify and understand the dynamics of the global carbon cycle that determine CO2 and CH4 fluxes and carbon storage in terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. Carbon cycle processes depend on climate, thus linking carbon cycle and climate change analyses is critical. Carbon cycle research involves multiple disciplines and extends over a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. Major multi-agency activities include the North American Carbon Program (NACP), an effort to describe and reduce uncertainties about the North American carbon budget and underlying processes, and the Ocean Carbon and Climate Change (OCCC) Program, a research effort aimed at determining how climate change will affect the future behavior of the oceanic carbon sink. In FY 2008, the NACP will address key gaps and uncertainties in the carbon syntheses developed previously, and aspects of the OCCC and NACP will be coordinated to better quantify and understand the roles of adjacent ocean basins in the North American carbon budget. NASA will launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) to provide, for the first time, consistent atmospheric carbon observations globally from space, and carbon data assimilation systems will begin to derive estimates of carbon sources and sinks from these measurements. 
A major accomplishment for this research element involves publication of The First State of the Carbon Cycle Report on the North American Carbon Budget and Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle (CCSP Synthesis and Assessment Product 2.2). It synthesizes current knowledge and uncertainties about carbon in North America relevant to the United States and the rest of the world, and provides baseline information to support decisionmaking on key issues related to U.S. carbon management and policy. In FY 2008, the NACP will address key gaps and uncertainties identified in the synthesis. Other planned activities will focus on integrating carbon cycle research, increasing observational and network capabilities, measuring carbon fluxes and stocks, conducting manipulative experiments, modeling the carbon cycle for predictive analyses, and coupling carbon models with other Earth component models for Earth system analyses. Successful completion will provide, and be measured by, integrated and accessible observational databases, quantified carbon budgets, more precise estimates of changes occurring or likely to occur, and more accurate
carbon sink and source estimates.
