Jan 02, 2015 11:56 AM EST By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Tropical forests may be absorbing far more carbon dioxide than thought, in response to rising atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas, according to a new NASA-led study.

The findings estimates that tropical forests absorb 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of a total global absorption of 2.5 billion -- more than is absorbed by forests in Canada, Siberia and other northern regions, called boreal forests.

"This is good news, because uptake in boreal forests is already slowing, while tropical forests may continue to take up carbon for many years," David Schimel , lead author of the study and member of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Forests and other land vegetation currently remove up to 30 percent of human carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. If the rate of absorption were to slow down, the rate of global warming would speed up in return.

The new study is the first to devise a way to make apples-to-apples comparisons of carbon dioxide estimates from many sources at different scales: computer models of ecosystem processes, atmospheric models run backward in time to deduce the sources of today's concentrations (called inverse models), satellite images, data from experimental forest plots and more. The researchers reconciled all types of analyses and assessed the accuracy of the results based on how well they reproduced independent, ground-based measurements. They obtained their new estimate of the tropical carbon absorption from the models they determined to be the most trusted and verified.

"Until our analysis, no one had successfully completed a global reconciliation of information about carbon dioxide effects from the atmospheric, forestry and modeling communities," Joshua Fisher, co-author of the study. "It is incredible that all these different types of independent data sources start to converge on an answer."

The findings are detailed online in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

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