New global observations of the terrestrial carbon cycle from GOSAT: Patterns of plant fluorescence with gross primary productivity

Our ability to close the Earth's carbon budget and predict feedbacks in a warming climate depends critically on knowing where, when and how carbon dioxide is exchanged between the land and atmosphere. Terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) constitutes the largest flux component in the global carbon budget, however significant uncertainties remain in GPP estimates and its seasonality. Empirically, we show that global spaceborne observations of solar induced chlorophyll fluorescence - occurring during photosynthesis - exhibit a strong linear correlation with GPP. We found that the fluorescence emission even without any additional climatic or model information has the same or better predictive skill in…

• NA
  National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• CI
  California Institute of Technology
• UO
  University of Montana
• JP
  Jet Propulsion Laboratory