Estimating nocturnal ecosystem respiration from the vertical turbulent flux and change in storage of CO2

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Eva van Gorsel - , Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR) (Author)
  • Nicolas Delpierre - , Université Paris-Saclay (Author)
  • Ray Leuning - , Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR) (Author)
  • Andy Black - , University of British Columbia (Author)
  • J. William Munger - , Harvard University (Author)
  • Steven Wofsy - , Harvard University (Author)
  • Marc Aubinet - , University of Liege (Author)
  • Christian Feigenwinter - , University of Liege, University of Basel (Author)
  • Jason Beringer - , Monash University (Author)
  • Damien Bonal - , INRAE UMR ECOFOG (Author)
  • Baozhang Chen - , University of British Columbia (Author)
  • Jiquan Chen - , University of Toledo (Author)
  • Robert Clement - , University of Edinburgh (Author)
  • Kenneth J. Davis - , Harvard University (Author)
  • Ankur R. Desai - , University of Wisconsin-Madison (Author)
  • Danilo Dragoni - , Indiana University Bloomington (Author)
  • Sophia Etzold - , ETH Zurich (Author)
  • Thomas Grünwald - , Chair of Meteorology, Chair of Meteorology (Author)
  • Lianhong Gu - , Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Author)
  • Bernhard Heinesch - , University of Liege (Author)
  • Lucy R. Hutyra - , Harvard University, Boston University (Author)
  • Wilma W.P. Jans - , Wageningen University & Research (WUR) (Author)
  • Werner Kutsch - , Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Author)
  • B. E. Law - , Oregon State University (Author)
  • Monique Y. Leclerc - , University of Georgia Griffin Campus (Author)
  • Ivan Mammarella - , University of Helsinki (Author)
  • Leonardo Montagnani - , Forest Services of the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano (Author)
  • Asko Noormets - , North Carolina State University (Author)
  • Corinna Rebmann - , Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Author)
  • Sonia Wharton - , Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Author)

Abstract

Micrometeorological measurements of nighttime ecosystem respiration can be systematically biased when stable atmospheric conditions lead to drainage flows associated with decoupling of air flow above and within plant canopies. The associated horizontal and vertical advective fluxes cannot be measured using instrumentation on the single towers typically used at micrometeorological sites. A common approach to minimize bias is to use a threshold in friction velocity, u*, to exclude periods when advection is assumed to be important, but this is problematic in situations when in-canopy flows are decoupled from the flow above. Using data from 25 flux stations in a wide variety of forest ecosystems globally, we examine the generality of a novel approach to estimating nocturnal respiration developed by van Gorsel et al. (van Gorsel, E., Leuning, R., Cleugh, H.A., Keith, H., Suni, T., 2007. Nocturnal carbon efflux: reconciliation of eddy covariance and chamber measurements using an alternative to the u*-threshold filtering technique. Tellus 59B, 397-403, Tellus, 59B, 307-403). The approach is based on the assumption that advection is small relative to the vertical turbulent flux (FC) and change in storage (FS) of CO2 in the few hours after sundown. The sum of FC and FS reach a maximum during this period which is used to derive a temperature response function for ecosystem respiration. Measured hourly soil temperatures are then used with this function to estimate respiration RRmax. The new approach yielded excellent agreement with (1) independent measurements using respiration chambers, (2) with estimates using ecosystem light-response curves of Fc + Fs extrapolated to zero light, RLRC, and (3) with a detailed process-based forest ecosystem model, Rcast. At most sites respiration rates estimated using the u*-filter, Rust, were smaller than RRmax and RLRC. Agreement of our approach with independent measurements indicates that RRmax provides an excellent estimate of nighttime ecosystem respiration.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1919-1930
Number of pages12
JournalAgricultural and forest meteorology
Volume149
Issue number11
Publication statusPublished - 3 Nov 2009
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-2263-0073/work/163766007

Keywords

Keywords

  • Advection, Chamber, Ecosystem respiration, Eddy covariance, Micrometeorology, Process-based modelling, u-star correction