Carbon cycle models quantify relationships between emission scenarios and resulting atmospheric concentrations, but are the projections credible? New analyses find grounds for both hope and concern.
AGU Advances
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Reporting Model Results Even When They Cannot (Yet) be Tested
Models simulating the nitrogen cycle track its multiple chemical forms but tend to report a subset that can be compared with available field measurements.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Grow-Fast-Die-Young Strategy Increases Swiss Forest Biomass
Climate change and CO2 fertilization can increase both growth and mortality of trees. The net effect on forest biomass depends on that trade-off, which long-term studies in Switzerland reveal.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Unexpected Consequences of Solar Geoengineering
Solar engineering is not a substitute for mitigation, and concerns about its risks and unintended impacts are supported by the recent discovery of overlooked atmospheric chemical feedback.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Observing the Impact of Convective Aggregation on Water Vapor
Remote sensing measurements for water vapor isotopic composition enable us to assess how convective aggregation influences the atmospheric hydrological cycle.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Better Bottom-Up Estimates of Wetland Methane Emissions
Limited monitoring of methane emissions from tropical wetlands could be obscuring these environments’ role in climate change.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Northern Ecosystems are Shaped by Snow
Changing climate in the Arctic leads to a shorter snow season but deeper snow in the depths of winter. Under the insulating snow, biological processes are accelerated leading to higher nutrient availability and carbon losses.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Pliocene Conveyer Belt in the Pacific
Ocean Drilling Program cores and helium isotopes put better constraints on the ocean circulation in the north Pacific.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Low-Frequency Quakes Have Modest Effect on Slow Earthquake Cycle
Slow slip phenomena on subdaily scales, captured by seismic and GNSS data, show that low-frequency earthquakes are incidental to larger magnitude slow earthquakes, in which aseismic slip dominates.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Barnacles Help Reconstruct Drift Path of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
Careful calibration of isotopes in a barnacle shell growing on ocean debris – in this case an airplane part – informs a new forensic method to identify its most probable drift path.