Predicting Anaerobic Microsites in Soils

Anaerobic microsites in soils are critical features in the Earth system as they are prime locations for generating powerful greenhouse gases. These processes occur in hot spots and hot moments and are therefore difficult to capture in mean-field approaches. Typically, they are captured as empirical functions of soil moisture.

We present a mechanistic upscaling of microsites from single soil particles to the soil column, by considering existing formulations that link the processes of solute diffusion, pore sizes and particle size distributions, and water retention. The upscaling allows to predict probability density functions of volume and surface area of anaerobic microsites, which can then be integrated to the scale of a laboratory soil sample or a field site. Our goal was to make these predictions based on variables typically measured in soils and are routine diagnostic or prognostic variables in Earth system model. While the detailed expressions can only be solved numerically, we found closed-form solutions with little loss of accuracy.  Our result have the necessary hooks for direct implementation of anaerobic microbial carbon processing, methane production and nitrification-denitrification processes in Earth System models. A first application yields two soil moisture-CO2 efflux hypotheses that could potentially be tested and which set this upscaling apart from empirical formulations 1) the degree of temperature sensitivity and dependence of carbon concentration in anaerobicity and 2) different CO2 response to soil moisture if measured in laboratory jars vs. measured in the field.