Abstract
Abstract. The monsoon based climate system, diverse land use and land cover distribution and cultural practices poses complex issues in monitoring, assessment and simulation of Indian carbon cycle. Several studies reported lack of spatially and temporally consistent databases, need for calibration and validation of models, and development of national frame work to maintain consistency and completeness in efforts and reduction of uncertainty. Considering the need, as part of ISRO Geosphere Biosphere Programme, National Carbon Project (NCP) initiative was taken up to understand and assess land, atmosphere and oceanic components of carbon cycle with a significant scope for integration of remote sensing, geospatial and process based models. The results from the initial studies are discussed in the paper. An increase of the country's forest carbon stocks from 6244.8 to 6621.6 Mt with an annual increment of 37.7 Mt of the carbon from 1995 to 2005 is reported. In the national scale, CASA model based average annual NPP is estimated to be 1.5 Pg C Yr-1 and is increasing at the rate of 0.005 Pg C Yr-2 during past 25 years from 1981–2006. Analysis of Mid tropospheric CO2 levels retrieved from AIRS data since 2002 till now revealed increasing rate of CO2 at 2.14 ppmv yr-1. It was also o found that biosphere uptake over India and oceanic uptake over the south Indian Ocean could play positive role on the control of seasonal variability of atmospheric carbon dioxide growth rate The paper presents further details on different sub components, recent results and challenges ahead of the project.
Highlights
Recent studies of Zhao and Running (2011) on changes in global Net primary productivity (NPP) during 2000-09, decline in the global land evapo transpiration trend during 1998-2008 due to limited moisture supply (Jung et al, 2010) and development of continuous satellite derived record of land surface evapo transpiration from 1983-2006 (Zhang et al, 2010) signifies the importance and scope of global, regional and national EO systems and field measurement networks
Unlike the regular forest inventories, soil inventories are rarely repeated on a regular basis and require chrono sequenced sampling to understand the impacts of different management regimes and land use changes on Carbon dynamics
Tress Outside Forests (TOF) are estimated using geospatial sampling procedures involving potential TOF strata(Surface water bodies, urban vegetated area, agriculture area, rail and road) obtained from IRS LISS –III (23m resolution) satellite data/SOI toposheets and tree number obtained from optimally sampled CARTOSAT-1 satellite data (2.5m resolution) and field sampling
Summary
Recent studies of Zhao and Running (2011) on changes in global NPP during 2000-09, decline in the global land evapo transpiration trend during 1998-2008 due to limited moisture supply (Jung et al, 2010) and development of continuous satellite derived record of land surface evapo transpiration from 1983-2006 (Zhang et al, 2010) signifies the importance and scope of global, regional and national EO systems and field measurement networks. The diverse natural and anthropogenic sources of CO2 and long range transport of atmospheric gases across varied topographic gradients as a function of intra and inter annual climatic variations affects sink potential of different categories of land cover. This necessitates regular measurements and monitoring of atmospheric CO2 and its transport modelling. An integrated approach of uniformly designed national field campaigns, retrieval and calibration of satellite based biophysical and geophysical variables and integrated modelling approaches for carbon cycle understanding, monitoring and simulation is suggested. The National Carbon Project was implemented as a set of three inter-related sub-projects and recent results from different sub projects and challenges ahead of the project are presented in the paper
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