Radiocarbon in the Land and Ocean Components of the Community Earth System Model

Abstract

Large amounts of the carbon-isotope 14C, entering Earth's carbon cycle, were produced in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. Here, we forced the ocean and land components of the Community Earth System Model with atmospheric 14CO2 over the historical period to constrain overturning time scales and fluxes. The uptake of bomb 14C by the land model is lower than observation-based estimates. This mismatch is likely linked to too-low 14C uptake by vegetation as the model overestimates 14C/C ratios of modern soils. This suggests model biases in forest productivity or wood carbon allocation and turnover, and, in turn, a bias in the forest sink of anthropogenic carbon. The ocean model matches the observation-based global bomb 14C inventories when applying the quadratic relationship between gas transfer piston velocity and wind speed of Wanninkhof (2014), https://doi.org/10.4319/lom.2014.12.351 and the wind products from Large and Yeager or the Japanese Reanalysis Project. Simulated natural radiocarbon ages in the deep ocean are many centuries older than data-based estimates, indicating too slow deep ocean ventilation. The sluggish circulation causes large biases in biogeochemical tracers and implies a delayed deep ocean uptake of heat and carbon in global warming projections. Our study suggests that 14C observations are key to constrain carbon fluxes and transport timescales for improved representations of land and ocean biogeochemical cycles and Earth system model projections.