Regional and seasonal partitioning of water and temperature controls on global land carbon uptake variability

Abstract Global fluctuations in annual land carbon uptake (NEE IAV ) depend on water and temperature variability, yet debate remains about local and seasonal controls of the global dependences. Here, we quantify regional and seasonal contributions to the correlations of globally-averaged NEE IAV against terrestrial water storage (TWS) and temperature, and respective uncertainties, using three approaches: atmospheric inversions, process-based vegetation models, and data-driven models. The three approaches agree that the tropics contribute over 63% of the global correlations, but differ on the dominant driver of the global NEE IAV , because they disagree on seasonal temperature effects in the Northern Hemisphere (NH, >25°N). In the NH, inversions and process-based models show inter-seasonal compensation of temperature effects, inducing a global TWS dominance supported by observations. Data-driven models show weaker seasonal compensation, thereby estimating a global temperature dominance. We provide a roadmap to fully understand drivers of global NEE IAV and discuss their implications for future carbon–climate feedbacks.