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High-latitude ecosystems have the capacity to release large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere in response to increasing temperatures, representing a potentially significant positive feedback within the climate system. Here, we combine aircraft and tower observations of atmospheric CO2 with remote sensing data and meteorological products to derive temporally and spatially resolved year-round CO2 fluxes across Alaska during 2012-2014. We find that tundra ecosystems were a net source of CO2 to the atmosphere annually, with especially high rates of respiration during early winter (October through December). Long-term records at Barrow, AK, suggest that CO2 emission rates from North Slope tundra have increased during the October through December period by 73% ± 11% since 1975, and are correlated with rising summer temperatures. Together, these results imply increasing early winter respiration and net annual emission of CO2 in Alaska, in response to climate warming. Our results provide evidence that the decadalscale increase in the amplitude of the CO2 seasonal cycle may be linked with increasing biogenic emissions in the Arctic, following the growing season. Early winter respirationwas not well simulated by the Earth System Models used to forecast future carbon fluxes in recent climate assessments. Therefore, these assessments may underestimate the carbon release from Arctic soils in response to a warming climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methane (CH4) fluxes from Alaska and other arctic regions may be sensitive to thawing permafrost and future climate change, but estimates of both current and future fluxes from the region are uncertain. This study estimates CH4 fluxes across Alaska for 2012-2014 using aircraft observations from the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) and a geostatistical inverse model (GIM). We find that a simple flux model based on a daily soil temperature map and a static map of wetland extent reproduces the atmospheric CH4 observations at the statewide, multiyear scale more effectively than global-scale process-based models. This result points to a simple and effective way of representing CH4 fluxes across Alaska. It further suggests that process-based models can improve their representation of key processes and that more complex processes included in these models cannot be evaluated given the information content of available atmospheric CH4 observations. In addition, we find that CH4 emissions from the North Slope of Alaska account for 24% of the total statewide flux of 1.74 ± 0.26 Tg CH4 (for May-October). Global-scale process models only attribute an average of 3% of the total flux to this region. This mismatch occurs for two reasons: process models likely underestimate wetland extent in regions without visible surface water, and these models prematurely shut down CH4 fluxes at soil temperatures near 0°C. Lastly, we find that the seasonality of CH4 fluxes varied during 2012-2014 but that total emissions did not differ significantly among years, despite substantial differences in soil temperature and precipitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We determined methane (CH4) emissions from Alaska using airborne measurements from the Carbon Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE). Atmospheric sampling was conducted between May and September 2012 and analyzed using a customized version of the polar weather research and forecast model linked to a Lagrangian particle dispersion model (stochastic timeinverted Lagrangian transport model). We estimated growing season CH4 fluxes of 8 ± 2 mg CH4.m-2-d-1 averaged over all of Alaska, corresponding to fluxes from wetlands of 56+22-13 mg CH4-m-2-d-1 if we assumed that wetlands are the only source from the land surface (all uncertainties are 95% confidence intervals from a bootstrapping analysis). Fluxes roughly doubled from May to July, then decreased gradually in August and September. Integrated emissions totaled 2.1 ± 0.5 Tg CH4 for Alaska from May to September 2012, close to the average (2.3; a range of 0.7 to 6 Tg CH4) predicted by various land surface models and inversion analyses for the growing season. Methane emissions from boreal Alaska were larger than from the North Slope; the monthly regional flux estimates showed no evidence of enhanced emissions during early spring or late fall, although these bursts may be more localized in time and space than can be detected by our analysis. These results provide an important baseline to which future studies can be compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]