Comment on bg-2022-55

Abstract

An important uncertainty in the modelling of methane (CH4) emissions from natural wetlands is the wetland area. It is difficult to model wetlands CH4 emissions because of several factors, including its spatial heterogeneity on a large range of scales. In this study, we investigate the impact of model resolution on the simulated wetland methane emission for the Fenno-Scandinavian Peninsula. This is done using a high-resolution wetland map (100 × 100m2) and soil carbon map (250 × 250m2) in combination with a highly simplified CH4 emission model that is coarsened in six steps from 0.005° to 1°. We find a strong relation between wetland emissions and resolution, which is sensitive, however, to the sub-grid treatment of the wetland fraction. In our setup, soil carbon and soil moisture are positively correlated at high-resolution with wetland location leading to increasing CH4 emissions with increasing resolution. Keeping track of wetland fraction reduces the impact of resolution. However, uncertainties in CH4 emissions remain high because of the large uncertainty in the representation of wetland area, as demonstrated using the output of the WetChimp intercomparison over our study domain. Because of wetlands mapping uncertainties, the existing models are unlikely to realistically represent the correlation between soil moisture and soil carbon availability. The correlation is positive in our simplified model, but maybe different in more complex models depending on their method of representing substrate availability. Therefore, depending on the correlation, CH4 emissions may be over or underestimated. As increasing the model resolution is an effective approach to mitigate the problem of accounting for the correlation between soil moisture and soil carbon and improve the accuracy of models, the main message of this study is that increasing the resolution of global wetland models, and especially the input datasets that are used, should receive high priority.

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