Temperature response functions introduce high uncertainty in modelled carbon stocks in cold temperature regimes

Abstract

Abstract. Models of carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems contain formulations for the dependence of respiration on temperature, but the sensitivity of predicted carbon pools and fluxes to these formulations and their parameterization is not understood. Thus, we made an uncertainty analysis of soil organic matter decomposition with respect to its temperature dependency using the ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS. We used five temperature response functions (Exponential, Arrhenius, Lloyd-Taylor, Gaussian, Van't Hoff). We determined the parameter uncertainty ranges of the functions by nonlinear regression analysis based on eight experimental datasets from northern hemisphere ecosystems. We sampled over the uncertainty bounds of the parameters and run simulations for each pair of temperature response function and calibration site. The uncertainty in both long-term and short-term soil carbon dynamics was analyzed over an elevation gradient in southern Switzerland. The function of Lloyd-Taylor turned out to be adequate for modelling the temperature dependency of soil organic matter decomposition, whereas the other functions either resulted in poor fits (Exponential, Arrhenius) or were not applicable for all datasets (Gaussian, Van't Hoff). There were two main sources of uncertainty for model simulations: (1) the uncertainty in the parameter estimates of the response functions, which increased with increasing temperature and (2) the uncertainty in the simulated size of carbon pools, which increased with elevation, as slower turn-over times lead to higher carbon stocks and higher associated uncertainties. The higher uncertainty in carbon pools with slow turn-over rates has important implications for the uncertainty in the projection of the change of soil carbon stocks driven by climate change, which turned out to be more uncertain for higher elevations and hence higher latitudes, which are of key importance for the global terrestrial carbon budget.