Low Latency Global Carbon Budget Reveals Late 2024 Carbon Losses and Contrasting Early 2025 Land Sink Recovery Signals
- Piyu Ke ,
- P. Ciais ,
- Yi-Tong Yao ,
- S. Sitch ,
- Wei Li ,
- Xiao-Meng Du ,
- Xiaofan Gui ,
- B. Poulter ,
- T. Colligan ,
- A. M. van der Woude ,
- J. Hooghiem ,
- W. Peters ,
- Zhu Liu ,
- Zhu Deng ,
- Zhe Jin ,
- Xiang-Jun Tian ,
- Yi-Long Wang ,
- Junjie Liu ,
- Sudhanshu Pandey ,
- C. O'Dell ,
- Jiang Bian ,
- John Miller ,
- Xin Lan ,
- Jefferson Gonçalves de Souza ,
- M. O'Sullivan ,
- Pierre Friedlingstein ,
- Julien Alléon ,
- Yi Xi ,
- Daniel S. Goll ,
- Lei Zhu ,
- G. R. van der Werf ,
- S. Piao ,
- F. Chevallier
Advanced Science |
ABSTRACT The 2023/24 El Niño strongly reduced land carbon uptake, but the persistence of this anomaly after surface cooling remains uncertain. Here we quantify the July 2024–June 2025 global CO2 budget using low‐latency fossil emission estimates, three DGVMs, machine learning ocean flux emulators and OCO‐2‐constrained atmospheric inversions. The atmospheric CO2 growth rate was 2.62 ± 0.08 ppm yr−1, 6.5% above the 2013–2022 July‐to‐June mean. DGVMs estimate that the net land sink was 1.32 ± 0.19 GtC yr−1 weaker than the 2015–2022 July‐to‐June mean, whereas combining bottom‐up and top‐down constraints gives a smaller deficit of 0.49 GtC yr−1. The annual anomaly is dominated by late‐2024 land carbon losses. Early‐2025 recovery, however, is method‐dependent: DGVMs retain a weak annual land‐sink deficit, while all inversions indicate fluxes close to the reference mean and a stronger‐than‐normal northern sink in late spring 2025. Ocean uptake shows no global weakening. A statistical decomposition links global land flux variability mainly to temperature, with terrestrial water storage contributing more strongly at regional scales. These results identify Northern Hemisphere land‐sink recovery as a central uncertainty in low‐latency carbon‐budget assessments.