Upscaling methane emission hotspots in boreal peatlands

Abstract

Upscaling the properties and effects of small-scale surface heterogeneities to larger scales is a challenging issue in land surface modeling. We developed a novel approach to upscale local methane emissions in a boreal peatland from the micro-topographic scale to the landscape scale. We based this new parameterization on the analysis of the water table pattern generated by the Hummock–Hollow model, a micro-topography resolving model for peatland hydrology. We introduce this parameterization of methane hotspots in a global model-like version of the Hummock–Hollow model that underestimates methane emissions. We tested the robustness of the parameterization by simulating methane emissions for the next century, forcing the model with three different RCP scenarios. The Hotspot parameterization, despite being calibrated for the 1976–2005 climatology, mimics the output of the micro-topography resolving model for all the simulated scenarios. The new approach bridges the scale gap of methane emissions between this version of the model and the configuration explicitly resolving micro-topography.