Modeled Microbial Dynamics Explain the Apparent Temperature Sensitivity of Wetland Methane Emissions

Summary

Methane emissions from natural wetlands tend to increase with temperature and therefore may lead to a positive feedback under future climate change. However, their temperature response includes confounding factors and appears to differ on different time scales. Observed methane emissions depend strongly on temperature on a seasonal basis, but if the annual mean emissions are compared between sites, there is only a small temperature effect. We hypothesize that microbial dynamics are a major driver of the seasonal cycle and that they can explain this apparent discrepancy. We introduce a relatively simple model of methanogenic growth and dormancy into a wetland methane scheme that is used in an Earth system model. We show that this addition is sufficient to reproduce the observed seasonal dyn