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Estimation of Gridded Atmospheric Oxygen Consumption from 1975 to 2018

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Abstract

Atmospheric Oxygen (O2) is one of the dominating features that allow the earth to be a habitable planet with advanced civilization and diverse biology. However, since the late 1980s, observational data have indicated a steady decline in O2 content on the scale of parts-per-million level. The current scientific consensus is that the decline is caused by the fossil-fuel combustion; however, few works have been done to quantitatively evaluate the response of O2 cycle under the anthropogenic impact, at both the global and regional scales. This paper manages to quantify the land O2 flux and makes the initial step to quantificationally describe the anthropogenic impacts on the global O2 budget. Our estimation reveals that the global O2 consumption has experienced an increase from 33.69 ± 1.11 to 47.63 ± 0.80 Gt (gigaton, 109 t) O2 yr−1 between 2000 and 2018, while the land production of O2 (totaling 11.34 ± 13.48 Gt O2 yr−1 averaged over the same period) increased only slightly. In 2018, the combustion of fossil-fuel and industrial activities (38.45 ± 0.61 Gt O2 yr−1) contributed the most to consumption, followed by wildfires (4.97 ± 0.48 Gt O2 yr−1) as well as livestock and human respiration processes (2.48 ± 0.16 and 1.73 ± 0.13 Gt O2 yr−1, respectively). Burning of fossil-fuel that causes large O2 fluxes occurs in East Asia, India, North America, and Europe, while wildfires that cause large fluxes in comparable magnitude are mainly distributed in central Africa.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Julia Steinbach from Stockholm University and Christoph Gerbig from Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry for providing the CO2 release and oxygen uptake from fossil fuel emission estimate (COFFEE) dataset. We thank Shixue Li from Hokkaido University for his valuable suggestions on this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Collaborative Innovation Center for Western Ecological Safety, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Xiaoyue Liu, Jianping Huang, Changyu Li & Lei Ding

  2. Enlightening Bioscience Research Center, Mississauga, L4X 2X7, Canada

    Jiping Huang

  3. Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Wenjun Meng

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  1. Xiaoyue Liu
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Correspondence to Jianping Huang.

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Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41521004) and China 111 Project (B13045).

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Liu, X., Huang, J., Huang, J. et al. Estimation of Gridded Atmospheric Oxygen Consumption from 1975 to 2018. J Meteorol Res 34, 646–658 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13351-020-9133-7

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