Simulating Erosion‐Induced Soil and Carbon Delivery From Uplands to Rivers in a Global Land Surface Model
(2020) Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems — Vol. 12, n° 11, p. 24 (2020)
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- Authors
Zhang, Haicheng 
Lauerwald, Ronny
- Abstract
- Global water erosion strongly affects the terrestrial carbon balance. However, this process iscurrently ignored by most global land surface models (LSMs) that are used to project the responses ofterrestrial carbon storage to climate and land use changes. One of the main obstacles to implementerosion processes in LSMs is the high spatial resolution needed to accurately represent the effect oftopography on soil erosion and sediment delivery to rivers. In this study, we present an upscaling scheme forincluding erosioninduced lateral soil organic carbon (SOC) movements into the ORCHIDEE LSM. Thisupscaling scheme integrates information from highresolution (3″) topographic and soil erodibility data intoa LSM forcing le at 0.5° spatial resolution. Evaluation of our model for the Rhine catchment indicatesthat it reproduces well the observed spatial and temporal (both seasonal and interannual) variations in riverrunoff and the sediment delivery from uplands to the river network. Although the average annual lateralSOC ux from uplands to the Rhine River network only amounts to 0.5% of the annual net primaryproduction and 0.01% of the total SOC stock in the whole catchment, SOC loss caused by soil erosion over along period (e.g., thousands of years) has the potential to cause a 12% reduction in the simulated equilibriumSOC stocks. Overall, this study presents a promising approach for including the erosioninduced lateralcarbon ux from the land to aquatic systems into LSMs and highlights the important role of erosionprocesses in the terrestrial carbon balance.
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Citations
Zhang, H., Lauerwald, R., Regnier, P., Ciais, P., Yuan, W., Naipal, V., Guenet, B., Van Oost, K., & Camino‐Serrano, M. (2020). Simulating Erosion‐Induced Soil and Carbon Delivery From Uplands to Rivers in a Global Land Surface Model. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 12(11), 24. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020ms002121 (Original work published 2020)