Global Carbon Budget 2016

Le Quéré, Corinne; Andrew, Robbie M.; Canadell, Josep G.; Sitch, Stephen; Korsbakken, Jan Ivar; Peters, Glen P.; Manning, Andrew C.; Boden, Thomas A.; Tans, Pieter P.; Houghton, Richard A.; Keeling, Ralph F.; Alin, Simone; Andrews, Oliver D.; Anthoni, Peter; Barbero, Leticia; Bopp, Laurent; Chevallier, Frédéric; Chini, Louise P.; Ciais, Philippe; Currie, Kim; Delire, Christine; Doney, Scott C.; Friedlingstein, Pierre; Gkritzalis, Thanos; Harris, Ian; Hauck, Judith; Haverd, Vanessa; Hoppema, Mario; Klein Goldewijk, Kees; Jain, Atul K.; Kato, Etsushi; Körtzinger, Arne; Landschützer, Peter; Lefèvre, Nathalie; Lenton, Andrew; Lienert, Sebastian; Lombardozzi, Danica; Melton, Joe R.; Metzl, Nicolas; Millero, Frank; Monteiro, Pedro M. S.; Munro, David R.; Nabel, Julia E. M. S.; Nakaoka, Shin-ichiro; O'Brien, Kevin; Olsen, Are; Omar, Abdirahman M.; Ono, Tsuneo; Pierrot, Denis; Poulter, Benjamin; Rödenbeck, Christian; Salisbury, Joe; Schuster, Ute; Schwinger, Jörg; Séférian, Roland; Skjelvan, Ingunn; Stocker, Benjamin D.; Sutton, Adrienne J.; Takahashi, Taro; Tian, Hanqin; Tilbrook, Bronte; van der Laan-Luijkx, Ingrid T.; van der Werf, Guido R.; Viovy, Nicolas; Walker, Anthony P.; Wiltshire, Andrew J.; Zaehle, Sönke

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-8-605-2016

Articles | Volume 8, issue 2

Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 8, 605–649, 2016

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-8-605-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 8, 605–649, 2016

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-8-605-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 8, issue 2

Review article 14 Nov 2016

Review article | 14 Nov 2016

Global Carbon Budget 2016

Corinne Le Quéré et al.

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Final revised paper (published on 14 Nov 2016)
Preprint (discussion started on 12 Oct 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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EC1: 'Editorial Comment', David Carlson, 12 Oct 2016

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Corinne Le Quere on behalf of the Authors (12 Oct 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (12 Oct 2016) by David Carlson

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (12 Oct 2016)

RR by Albertus J. (Han) Dolman (14 Oct 2016)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

In general, the authors have again done a great job in pulling everything together. I have a few comments to make, however. One is general and maybe something for the next version. As it stands the paper generally keeps the older texts and it thus keeps on expanding. Some of the text bits are there because of recent new findings and have become less relevant through time. I would advise the authors next time to check with the editor if some pruning of old text may be allowed and useful. I feel that this will improve the readability.

Page 5 line 5. Maybe also something for the next version to consider. I appreciate the history of the different carbon communities, but to an outside reader it may appear a bit strange if one talks about atmospheric growth rate and ocean and land sinks. While the units are the same, the public’s perception is not, and I would think using the term sink (or source) also for the atmosphere would help. Or alternatively one could start using growth rate for the land and ocean stores, but that is probably a bit far fetched.

Page 8 line 8. It is good that the new statistics are being used. However, as a reader, knowing that this is a key uncertainty in the budget, I would like to know rather exactly how much the BP estimates differ from the CDIAC ones.

Page 32. The new paper by Scwietzke et al (Nature 2016, 538: 88-91) needs to be mentioned. Ideally the consequences for the fossil fuel methane budget need to be propagated through in the CO₂ budget.

Page 34 line 23-24. A change in the mean from 1.5 to 1 GtonC yr-1 is not exactly “remain constant”. The subsequent paragraph over the high uncertainty then also stands in contrast. I am not convinced that using a DGVM ensemble is te best way to “beat” a satellite based estimate. It would help if the authors can have a look at how to phrase this appropriately. At the moment is reads a bit like “we don’t really understand all of this”.

Page 39 line 16. Add “and la Nina” or refer to the ENSO cycle. The variability goes both ways.

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RR by Martin Heimann (18 Oct 2016)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (18 Oct 2016) by David Carlson

AR by Corinne Le Quere on behalf of the Authors (31 Oct 2016) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

The Global Carbon Budget 2016 is the 11th annual update of emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and their partitioning among the atmosphere, land, and ocean. This data synthesis brings together measurements, statistical information, and analyses of model results in order to provide an assessment of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties for years 1959 to 2015, with a projection for year 2016.