Nitrous Oxide (N2O)
Nitrous oxide is ~ 298 times more potent as a greenhouse gas (GHG) relative to CO2. N2O has no significant sinks on land and is destroyed by chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere. Land surfaces are the main source of atmospheric N2O indicating that changes in land-use practices can modify soil emissions and influence N2O concentration in the atmosphere. The uncertainty of sources and sinks of N2O and its atmospheric lifetime limit an accurate budget. Existing data on fluxes of N2O from soils and oceans are insufficient to quantify them in detail. About half of the global N2O emissions are anthropogenic resulting from microbiological processes in soils related to agriculture and tropical forests. The importance of quantification for N2O across PαC projects in combination with CO2 and CH4 is a high priority and should add to diverse ecosystem level data for this important GHG of the tropics.
Additional Reading:
IPCC Working Group I: The Scientific Basis
https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/136.htm
Arias‐Navarro, Cristina, Eugenio Díaz‐Pinés, Steffen Klatt, Patric Brandt, Mariana C. Rufino, Klaus Butterbach‐Bahl, and L. V. Verchot. “Spatial variability of soil N2O and CO2 fluxes in different topographic positions in a tropical montane forest in Kenya.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences 122, no. 3 (2017): 514-527.
Lognoul, Margaux, Alain Debacq, Bernard Heinesch, and Marc Aubinet. “N2O eddy covariance fluxes: from field measurements to flux analysis.” (2017).
Olin, Stefan, Xu-Ri Xing, David Wårlind, Peter Eliasson, Ben Smith, and Almut Arneth. “Global terrestrial N2O budget for present and future.” In EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts, vol. 19, p. 17872. 2017.
Upstill-Goddard, Robert C., Matthew E. Salter, Paul J. Mann, Jonathan Barnes, John Poulsen, Bienvenu Dinga, Gregory J. Fiske, and Robert M. Holmes. “The riverine source of CH 4 and N 2 O from the Republic of Congo, western Congo Basin.” Biogeosciences 14, no. 9 (2017): 2267.
Dlugokencky, E. J., A. M. Crotwell, M. Crotwell, K. A. Masarie, P. M. Lang, G. S. Dutton, and B. D. Hall. “NOAA’s Global Network of N2O Observations.” In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts. 2014.