Future projections of evapotranspiration (ET) are of critical importance for agricultural and freshwater management and for predicting land–atmosphere feedbacks on the climate system. However, ET from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) simulations exhibits substantial biases, bolstering little confidence in future ET projections. Despite poor predictive skill and large bias of ET… More
From a dry vantage point on Twitchell Island, the deck of a cargo ship skims by, above a fragile levee that holds back the mighty San Joaquin River. A few centuries ago, standing in this same spot, we would have been covered in ten or twenty feet of peat, the residue from millennia of accumulating… More
Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key component of the atmospheric and terrestrial water and energy budgets. Satellite‐based vegetation index approaches have used remotely sensed vegetation and reanalysis meteorological properties with surface energy balance models to estimate global ET (MOD16 ET). We reconstructed satellite retrievals using in situ meteorology (Argonne‐ET) and evaluated them using a dense network… More
Releases of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) from thawing permafrost are expected to be among the largest feedbacks to climate from arctic ecosystems. However, the current net carbon (C) balance of terrestrial arctic ecosystems is unknown. Recent studies suggest that these ecosystems are sources, sinks, or approximately in balance at present…. More
Restoring degraded peat soils presents an attractive, but largely untested, climate change mitigation approach. Drained peat soils used for agriculture can be large greenhouse gas sources. By restoring subsided peat soils to managed, impounded wetlands, significant agricultural emissions are avoided, and soil carbon can be sequestered and protected. Here, we synthesize 36 site-years of continuous… More
Reforesting and managing ecosystems have been proposed as ways to mitigate global warming and offset anthropogenic carbon emissions. The intent of our opinion piece is to provide a perspective on how well plants and ecosystems sequester carbon. The ability of individual plants and ecosystems to mine carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as defined by rates… More
Aerodynamic canopy height (ha) is the effective height of vegetation canopy for its influence on atmospheric fluxes and is a key parameter of surface‐atmosphere coupling. However, methods to estimate ha from data are limited. This synthesis evaluates the applicability and robustness of the calculation of ha from eddy covariance momentum‐flux data. At 69 forest sites,… More