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©2014. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved. Climate extremes such as droughts and heat waves affect terrestrial ecosystems and may alter local carbon budgets. However, it still remains uncertain to what degree extreme impacts in the carbon cycle influence the carbon cycle-climate feedback both today and the near future. Here we analyze spatiotemporally contiguous negative extreme anomalies in gross primary production (GPP) and net ecosystem production (NEP) in model output of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) ensemble and investigate their future development and attribution to climatic drivers. We find that relative to the overall increase in global carbon uptake, negative extremes in GPP and NEP lose importance toward the end of the 21st century. This effect can be related to elevated CO2 concentrations and higher amounts of available water at the global scale, partially mitigating the impacts of droughts and heat waves, respectively. Overall, based on CMIP5 models, we hypothesize that terrestrial ecosystems might be more resilient against future climate extremes than previously thought. Future work will have to further scrutinize these results considering that various biological and biogeochemical feedbacks are not yet integrated within Earth system models. Key Points Relative impact of negative extremes in GPP and NEP does not increase till 2100Negative extremes in GPP and NEP are driven by concurrent dry and hot conditions

Understanding the impacts of climate extremes on the carbon cycle is important for quantifying the carbon-cycle climate feedback and highly relevant to climate change assessments. Climate extremes and fires can have severe regional effects, but a spatially explicit global impact assessment is still lacking. Here, we directly quantify spatiotemporal contiguous extreme anomalies in four global data sets of gross primary production (GPP) over the last 30 years. We find that positive and negative GPP extremes occurring on 7% of the spatiotemporal domain explain 78% of the global interannual variation in GPP and a significant fraction of variation in the net carbon flux. The largest thousand negative GPP extremes during 1982-2011 (4.3% of the data) account for a decrease in photosynthetic carbon uptake of about 3.5 Pg C yr-1, with most events being attributable to water scarcity. The results imply that it is essential to understand the nature and causes of extremes to understand current and future GPP variability. © 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd.