Global ocean CO2 uptake from observations : an uncertainty analysis
In past decades, the magnitude of the ocean carbon sink was mainly estimated from global ocean biogeochemistry models and atmospheric inverse models but the recent increase in oceanic CO2 measurements and the creation of the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) database has opened new research avenues, including the possibility to monitor the temporal evolution of the global oceanic carbon sink based on surface ocean CO2 measurements covering the open ocean, marginal seas and coastal waters. Together with colleagues at MPI Meteorology-Hamburg, we perform an extensive assessment of global and regional flux uncertainty estimates to help better constrain the ocean carbon uptake based on observations.
This analysis is particularly relevant for global carbon budget analysis since to date the quantification of the global land sink is still largely dependent on the quantification of the ocean carbon uptake.
Relevant project(s): C-CASCADES
People involved: Alizée Roobaert, Goulven Laruelle, Pierre Regnier
Uncertainty in global air-sea CO2 flux induced by k formulations and wind forcing : distributions of oceanic air–sea mean FCO2 (mol C m−2 yr−1) generated from a 21 year climatology (1991–2011) using the Wanninkhof et al. (2009) k parametrization combined with NCEP1 (a) and the Sweeney et al. (2007) k relationship combined with NCEP2 (b).