Impacts of climate change on net primary production: A modelling study at pan-european scale

Abstract

Identification of the net primary production capacity of European vegetated areas has been becoming the meaning since last decades. Responses of carbon uptake by autotrophs and storage in terrestrial ecosystems under environmental changes is quite important to understand and predict the biogeochemical cycles, and thus the interactions between atmosphere and terrestrial biosphere in the future. Remote sensing of the Earth systems has been having very important roles for calibration of the modelling results during last 20 years. In this paper, we simulate the impacts of the climate change and elevated CO2 in the atmosphere on net primary production by autotrophs by using Community Land Model vers. 4.5 (CLM4.5) with remarkable high grid resolution (i. e. 25x25 km) at pan-European scale. We especially focused on the time period in the future when the global warming reaches the 2 degrees C (i. e. 2034-2063) in Europe. The CLM4.5 model performs quite good in Western and Southern Europe. Although the model predicts the NPP ca. 2 times higher than the remote sensed NPP by MODIS, the analysis between in-situ data and CLM4.5 shows better correlation than between in-situ data and remote sensed NPP in 19 study areas. Despite of the higher correlation of the model with in-situ data, it is still needed long-term observation studies needed from different biome types and plant functional types.