Details:

Journal Title:
Global Biogeochemical Cycles
Personal Author:
Bushinsky, Seth M. ; Landschützer, Peter ; Rödenbeck, Christian ; Gray, Alison R. ; Baker, David ; ... More +
Bushinsky, Seth M. ; Landschützer, Peter ; Rödenbeck, Christian ; Gray, Alison R. ; Baker, David ; Mazloff, Matthew R. ; Resplandy, Laure ; Johnson, Kenneth S. ; Sarmiento, Jorge L. Less -
NOAA Program & Office:
CIRA (Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere)
Description:
New estimates of pCO2 from profiling floats deployed by the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) project have demonstrated the importance of wintertime outgassing south of the Polar Front, challenging the accepted magnitude of Southern Ocean carbon uptake (Gray et al., 2018, https://doi:10.1029/2018GL078013). Here, we put 3.5 years of SOCCOM observations into broader context with the global surface carbon dioxide database (Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas, SOCAT) by using the two interpolation methods currently used to assess the ocean models in the Global Carbon Budget (Le Quéré et al., 2018, https://doi:10.5194/essd‐10‐2141‐2018) to create a ship‐only, a float‐weighted, and a combined estimate of Southern Ocean carbon fluxes (<35°S). In our ship‐only estimate, we calculate a mean uptake of −1.14 ± 0.19 Pg C/yr for 2015–2017, consistent with prior studies. The float‐weighted estimate yields a significantly lower Southern Ocean uptake of −0.35 ± 0.19 Pg C/yr. Subsampling of high‐resolution ocean biogeochemical process models indicates that some of the differences between float and ship‐only estimates of the Southern Ocean carbon flux can be explained by spatial and temporal sampling differences. The combined ship and float estimate minimizes the root‐mean‐square pCO2 difference between the mapped product and both data sets, giving a new Southern Ocean uptake of −0.75 ± 0.22 Pg C/yr, though with uncertainties that overlap the ship‐only estimate. An atmospheric inversion reveals that a shift of this magnitude in the contemporary Southern Ocean carbon flux must be compensated for by ocean or land sinks within the Southern Hemisphere.
Keywords:
[+]
Biogeochemistry Ocean-atmosphere Interaction Remote Sensing
Source:
Global Biogeochemical Cycles 33(11): 1370-1388, 2019
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GB006176
Pubmed Central ID:
PMC32025087
Document Type:
Journal Article
Place as Subject:
Antarctic Ocean
Rights Information:
CC BY
Compliance:
PMC
Main Document Checksum:
[+]
urn:sha256:f92fc40f508d14e48ef65e246250960d2f333dee77bfcf181915c7f65e8cffce
Download URL:
https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/28603/noaa_28603_DS1.pdf
File Type:

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