Timescales of the permafrost carbon cycle and legacy effects of temperature overshoot scenarios

Minimizing the risks and impacts of climate change requires limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial levels, while the difficulty of reducing carbon emissions at the necessary rate increases the likelihood of temporarily overshooting this climate target. Using simulations with the land surface model JSBACH, we show that it takes high-latitude ecosystems and the state of permafrost-affected soils several centuries to adjust to the atmospheric conditions that arise at the 1.5 degrees C-target. Here, a temporary warming of the Arctic entails important legacy effects and we show that feedbacks between water-, energy- and carbon cycles allow for multiple steady-states in permafrost regions, which differ with respect to the physical state of the soil, the soil carbon concentrations and the terrestrial carbon uptake and -release. The steady-states depend on the soil organic matter content at the point of climate stabilization, which is significantly affected by an overshoot-induced soil carbon loss. In this study, the authors investigate a scenario where global temperature increase is limited to 1.5 degrees C. They find that Arctic ecosystems will need centuries to adapt to such an increase and that the ensuing steady-state depends on the preceding climate trajectory.