Ranga Myneni coauthors article in Nature Communications on emergent constraints
Professor Ranga Myneni has coauthored “Earth system models underestimate carbon fixation by plants in the high latitudes” with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, where he spent part of his sabbatical period in 2018. The article, published in Nature Communications, reports on using greening sensitivity inferred from the past three decades of satellite measurements as an emergent constraint on photosynthetic carbon fixation by plants in the Northern high latitudes in a two-times pre-industrial CO2 atmosphere. This estimate, confirmed by three alternate estimates, shows that most models are underestimating carbon fixation by plants.