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A Process-Model Perspective On Recent Changes In The Carbon Cycle Of North America, Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo, Benjamin Poulter, Rodrigo Vargas, Daniel Hayes, Anna M. Michalak, Christopher A. Williams, Lisamarie Windham-Myers, Jonathan A. Wang, Kimberly P. Wickland, David Butman, Hanqin Tian, Stephen Sitch, Pierre Friedlingstein, Mike O’Sullivan, Peter Briggs, Vivek Arora, Danica Lombardozzi, Atul K. Jain, Wenping Yuan, Roland Séférian, Julia Nabel, Andy Wiltshire, Almut Arneth, Sebastian Lienert, Sönke Zaehle, Vladislav Bastrikov, Daniel Goll, Nicolas Vuichard, Anthony Walker, Etsushi Kato, Xu Yue, Zhen Zhang

Geography

Continental North America has been found to be a carbon (C) sink over recent decades by multiple studies employing a variety of estimation approaches. However, several key questions and uncertainties remain with these assessments. Here we used results from an ensemble of 19 state-of-the-art dynamic global vegetation models from the TRENDYv9 project to improve these estimates and study the drivers of its interannual variability. Our results show that North America has been a C sink with a magnitude of 0.37 ± 0.38 (mean and one standard deviation) PgC year−1 for the period 2000–2019 (0.31 and 0.44 PgC year−1 in each …