High natural nitric oxide emissions from lakes on Tibetan Plateau under rapid warming

Jun 11, 2023

Nature Geoscience (2023)Cite this article

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Nitrogen oxides affect health and climate. Their emissions, in the form of nitric oxide, from inland waters such as lakes are generally considered negligible and are absent in air quality and climate models. Here we find unexpected high emissions of nitric oxide from remote lakes on the Tibetan Plateau, based on satellite observations of tropospheric nitrogen dioxide vertical column densities and subsequent emission inversion at a fine resolution of 5 km. The total emissions from 135 lakes larger than 50 km2 reach 1.9 metric tons N h−1, comparable to anthropogenic emissions in individual megacities worldwide or the Tibet Autonomous Region. On average, the emissions per unit area reach 63.4 μg N m−2 h−1, exceeding those from crop fields. Such strong natural emissions from inland waters have not been reported, to the best of our knowledge. The emissions are derived from microbial processes in association with substantial warming and melting of glacier and permafrost on the plateau, constituting a previously unknown feedback between climate, lake ecology and nitrogen emissions.

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NO2 VCD and NO emission data produced in this study are available in Supplementary Data. Data obtained from publicly available sources are available from the references. Source data are provided with this paper.

Codes for NO2 VCD retrieval and NO emission inversion are available on a collaboration basis.

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We thank Y. Li and R. Xu for information of the TP, and D. Wu for discussion of nitrogen emission mechanisms. Funding: The Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program grant no. 2019QZKK0604; The National Natural Science Foundation of China grant no. 42075175.

Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China

Hao Kong, Jintai Lin, Yuhang Zhang, Chunjin Li, Chenghao Xu & Lu Shen

College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, National Academy of Agriculture Green Development, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

Xuejun Liu

Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Kun Yang

National Tibetan Plateau Data Center, State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System and Resource Environment, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Kun Yang

Multiphase Chemistry Department, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany

Hang Su

Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Hang Su

State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather & Key Laboratory for Atmospheric Chemistry of CMA, Institute of Atmospheric Composition, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, China

Wanyun Xu

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J.L. conceived the research. J.L. and H.K. designed the research. H.K. performed the research. C.L., L.S., X.L., K.Y., H.S. and W.X. commented on the microbial mechanism. Y.Z. helped interpret satellite NO2 data. C.X. helped interpret the TP environment. H.K. and J.L. analysed the results and wrote the paper with comments from X.L., K.Y. and W.X.

Correspondence to Jintai Lin.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Nature Geoscience thanks David Fowler, Pertti Martikainen and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary handling editor: Xujia Jiang, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Left column: standard retrieval. Middle column: retrieval by doubling the surface reflectance. Right column: retrieval by halving the surface reflectance.

Source data

The 135 lakes studied here are shown with black boundaries and other lakes are shown with blue boundaries. The cloud data are from ref. 1.

Source data

Data are taken from the MODIS Atmosphere L2 Aerosol Product (ref. 2, MYD04 Collection 6.1, last access: 12/03/2019).

Source data

Detailed information of NO2 VCDs and NOx emissions from the 135 lakes.

Source data for Fig. 1a,b. Line2-521: gridded NO2 VCDs of Fig. 1a; Line523: time series of average NO2 VCD over the lakes based on POMINO-TROPOMI; Line525: time series of average NO2 VCD over the lakes based on the official data product; Line527: errors of the average NO2 VCDs over the lakes based on POMINO-TROPOMI; Line529: errors of the average NO2 VCDs over the lakes based on the official data product.

Source data for Fig. 2a,b. Line2-521: gridded NO emissions of Fig. 2a; Line524: total NO emissions of the top ten emitting lakes; Line526: errors of the total NO emissions; Line528: NO emission per unit area of the top ten emitting lakes; Line530: errors of the NO emission per unit area.

Source data for Extended Data Fig. 1. Line2-521: gridded NO2 VCDs of standard retrieval; Line523-1042: gridded NO2 VCDs of retrieval by doubling the surface reflectance over the lakes; Line1044-1563: gridded NO2 VCDs of retrieval by halving the surface reflectance over the lakes; Line1565-2084: gridded surface reflectance adopted in standard retrieval; Line2086-2605: gridded surface reflectance (doubled over the lakes); Line2607-3126: gridded surface reflectance (halved over the lakes).

Source data for Extended Fig. 2 (gridded CRF).

Source data for Extended Fig. 3 (gridded AOD data).

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Kong, H., Lin, J., Zhang, Y. et al. High natural nitric oxide emissions from lakes on Tibetan Plateau under rapid warming. Nat. Geosci. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01200-8

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Received: 20 August 2022

Accepted: 09 May 2023

Published: 01 June 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01200-8

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