Decadal variations and trends of the global ocean carbon sink

We investigate the variations of the ocean CO2 sink during the past three decades using global surface ocean maps of the partial pressure of CO2 reconstructed from observations contained in the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas Version 2. To create these maps, we used the neural network-based data-interpolation method of [Landschützer2014], but extended the work in time from 1998 through 2011 to the period from 1982 through 2011. Our results suggest strong decadal variations in the global ocean carbon sink around a long-term increase that corresponds roughly to that expected from the rise in atmospheric CO2. The sink is estimated to have weakened during the 1990s toward a minimum uptake of only -0.8 ± 0.5 Pg C yr − 1 in 2000, and thereafter to have strengthened considerably to rates of more than -2.0 ± 0.5 Pg C yr − 1. These decadal variations originate mostly from the extratropical oceans while the tropical regions contribute primarily to interannual variations. Changes in sea-surface temperature affecting the solubility of CO2 explain part of these variations, particularly at subtropical latitudes. But most of the higher latitude changes are attributed to modifications in the surface concentration of dissolved inorganic carbon and alkalinity, induced by decadal variations in atmospheric forcing, with patterns that are reminiscent of those of the Northern and Southern Annular Modes. These decadal variations lead to a substantially smaller cumulative anthropogenic CO2 uptake of the ocean over the 1982 through 2011 period (reduction of 7.5 ± 5.5 Pg C) relative to that derived by the Global Carbon Budget

Carbon dioxide and ocean acidification observations in UK waters. Synthesis report with a focus on 2010–2015

Key messages: 1.1 The process of ocean acidification is now relatively well-documented at the global scale as a long-term trend in the open ocean. However, short-term and spatial variability can be high. 1.2 New datasets made available since Charting Progress 2 make it possible to greatly improve the characterisation of CO2 and ocean acidification in UK waters. 3.1 Recent UK cruise data contribute to large gaps in national and global datasets. 3.2 The new UK measurements confirm that pH is highly variable, therefore it is important to measure consistently to determine any long term trends. 3.3 Over the past 30 years, North Sea pH has decreased at 0.0035±0.0014 pH units per year. 3.4 Upper ocean pH values are highest in spring, lowest in autumn. These changes reflect the seasonal cycles in photosynthesis, respiration (decomposition) and water mixing. 3.5 Carbonate saturation states are minimal in the winter, and lower in 7 more northerly, colder waters. This temperature-dependence could have implications for future warming of the seas. 3.6 Over the annual cycle, North-west European seas are net sinks of CO2. However, during late summer to autumn months, some coastal waters may be significant sources. 3.7 In seasonally-stratified waters, sea-floor organisms naturally experience lower pH and saturation states; they may therefore be more vulnerable to threshold changes. 3.8 Large pH changes (0.5 - 1.0 units) can occur in the top 1 cm of sediment; however, such effects are not well-documented. 3.9 A coupled forecast model estimates the decrease in pH trend within the North Sea to be -0.0036±0.00034 pH units per year, under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario (RCP 8.5). 3.10 Seasonal estimates from the forecast model demonstrate areas of the North Sea that are particularly vulnerable to aragonite undersaturation

Regional Wind Variability Modulates the Southern Ocean Carbon Sink

The Southern Ocean south of 35 degrees S accounts for approximately half of the annual oceanic carbon uptake, thereby substantially mitigating the effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The intensity of this important carbon sink varies considerably on inter-annual to decadal timescales. However, the drivers of this variability are still debated, challenging our ability to accurately predict the future role of the Southern Ocean in absorbing atmospheric carbon. Analysing mapped sea-air CO2 fluxes, estimated from upscaled surface ocean CO2 measurements, we find that the overall Southern Ocean carbon sink has weakened since similar to 2011, reversing the trend of the reinvigoration period of the 2000s. Although we find significant regional positive and negative responses of the Southern Ocean carbon uptake to changes in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) over the past 35 years, the net effect of the SAM on the Southern Ocean carbon sink variability is approximately zero, due to the opposing effects of enhanced outgassing in upwelling regions and enhanced carbon uptake elsewhere. Instead, regional shifts in sea level pressure, linked to zonal wavenumber 3 (ZW3) and related changes in surface winds substantially contribute to the inter-annual to decadal variability of the Southern Ocean carbon sink

Detecting Regional Modes of Variability in Observation-Based Surface Ocean pCO(2)

We use a neural network-based estimate of the sea surface partial pressure of CO2 (pCO(2)) derived from measurements assembled within the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas to investigate the dominant modes of pCO(2) variability from 1982 through 2015. Our analysis shows that detrended and deseasonalized sea surface pCO(2) varies substantially by region and the respective frequencies match those from the major modes of climate variability (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, multivariate ENSO index, Southern Annular Mode), suggesting a climate modulated air-sea exchange of CO2. We find that most of the regional pCO(2) variability is driven by changes in the ocean circulation and/or changes in biology, whereas the North Atlantic variability is tightly linked to temperature variations in the surface ocean and the resulting changes in solubility. Despite the 34-year time series, our analysis reveals that we can currently only detect one to two periods of slow frequency oscillations, challenging our ability to robustly link pCO(2) variations to climate variability. Plain Language Summary In our study we show that there is a link between the amount of carbon in the surface ocean and natural climate variability. We find that this variability is very different between different oceanic regions, but most of the observed variability is on decadal timescales and longer. Current data products therefore do not extend long enough in time to robustly detect long-term oscillations of the surface ocean carbon content

A uniform pCO(2) climatology combining open and coastal oceans

In this study, we present the first combined open- and coastal-ocean pCO(2) mapped monthly climatology (Landschutzer et al., 2020b, https://doi.org/10.25921/qb25-f418, https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/ocads/oceans/MPI-ULB-SOM_FFN_clim.html, last access: 8 April 2020) constructed from observations collected between 1998 and 2015 extracted from the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) database. We combine two neural network-based pCO(2) products, one from the open ocean and the other from the coastal ocean, and investigate their consistency along their common overlap areas. While the difference between open- and coastal-ocean estimates along the overlap area increases with latitude, it remains close to 0 mu atm globally. Stronger discrepancies, however, exist on the regional level resulting in differences that exceed 10 % of the climatological mean pCO(2), or an order of magnitude larger than the uncertainty from state-of-the-art measurements. This also illustrates the potential of such an analysis to highlight where we lack a good representation of the aquatic continuum and future research should be dedicated. A regional analysis further shows that the seasonal carbon dynamics at the coast-open interface are well represented in our climatology. While our combined product is only a first step towards a true representation of both the open-ocean and the coastal-ocean air-sea CO2 flux in marine carbon budgets, we show it is a feasible task and the present data product already constitutes a valuable tool to investigate and quantify the dynamics of the air-sea CO2 exchange consistently for oceanic regions regardless of its distance to the coast

The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of the Sources and Sinks of CO2 in the Global Coastal Ocean

In contrast to the open ocean, the sources and sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in the coastal seas are poorly constrained and understood. Here we address this knowledge gap by analyzing the spatial and temporal variability of the coastal air-sea flux of CO2 (FCO2) using a recent high-resolution (0.25 degrees) monthly climatology for coastal sea surface partial pressure in CO2 (pCO(2)). Coastal regions are characterized by CO2 sinks at temperate and high latitudes and by CO2 sources at low latitude and in the tropics, with annual mean CO2 flux densities comparable in magnitude and pattern to those of the adjacent open ocean with the exception of river-dominated systems. The seasonal variations in FCO2 are large, often exceeding 2 mol C m(-2) year(-1), a magnitude similar to the variations exhibited across latitudes. The majority of these seasonal variations stems from the air-sea pCO(2) difference, although changes in wind speed and sea ice cover can also be significant regionally. Globally integrated, the coastal seas act currently as a CO2 sink of -0.20 +/- 0.02 Pg C year(-1), with a more intense uptake occurring in summer because of the disproportionate influence of high-latitude shelves in the Northern Hemisphere. Combined with estimates of the carbon sinks in the open ocean and the Arctic, this gives for the global ocean, averaged over the 1998 to 2015 period an annual net CO2 uptake of -1.7 +/- 0.3 Pg C year(-1)

Multidecadal changes in biology influence the variability of the North Atlantic carbon sink

The North Atlantic Ocean is the most intense marine sink for anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) in the world's oceans, showing high variability and substantial changes over recent decades. However, the contribution of biology to the variability and trend of this sink is poorly understood. Here we use in situ plankton measurements, alongside observation-based sea surface CO2 data from 1982 to 2020, to investigate the biological influence on the CO2 sink. Our results demonstrate that long term variability in the CO2 sink in the North Atlantic is associated with changes in phytoplankton abundance and community structure. These data show that within the subpolar regions of the North Atlantic, phytoplankton biomass is increasing, while a decrease is observed in the subtropics, which supports model predictions of climate-driven changes in productivity. These biomass trends are synchronous with increasing temperature, changes in mixing and an increasing uptake of atmospheric CO2 in the subpolar North Atlantic. Our results highlight that phytoplankton play a significant role in the variability as well as the trends of the CO2 uptake from the atmosphere over recent decades

Reconciling Observation and Model Trends in North Atlantic Surface CO2

The North Atlantic Ocean is a region of intense uptake of atmospheric CO2. To assess how this CO2 sink has evolved over recent decades, various approaches have been used to estimate basin-wide uptake from the irregularly sampled in situ CO2 observations. Until now, the lack of robust uncertainties associated with observation-based gap-filling methods required to produce these estimates has limited the capacity to validate climate model simulated surface ocean CO2 concentrations. After robustly quantifying basin-wide and annually varying interpolation uncertainties using both observational and model data, we show that the North Atlantic surface ocean fugacity of CO2 (fCO(2-ocean)) increased at a significantly slower rate than that simulated by the latest generation of Earth System Models during the period 1992-2014. We further show, with initialized model simulations, that the inability of these models to capture the observed trend in surface fCO(2-ocean) is primarily due to biases in the models' ocean biogeochemistry. Our results imply that current projections may underestimate the contribution of the North Atlantic to mitigating increasing future atmospheric CO2 concentrations

Reassessing Southern Ocean Air-Sea CO2 Flux Estimates With the Addition of Biogeochemical Float Observations

New estimates of pCO(2) 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, ). 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 Quere et al., 2018, ) to create a ship-only, a float-weighted, and a combined estimate of Southern Ocean carbon fluxes (<35 degrees 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 pCO(2) 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. Plain Language Summary The Southern Ocean is thought to take up a significant amount of carbon dioxide each year but is a difficult region to observe due to its remote location and harsh winter weather. Recently, autonomous robots deployed by the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project have been making year-round measurements of ocean carbonate chemistry, from which we can estimate surface carbon dioxide. These provide new data at times and locations where we previously had very little. We found that combining the float observations with traditional shipboard data reduced our estimate for the amount carbon that the Southern Ocean takes up each year, though by less than had been previously estimated when considering float observations alone. We also show that some of the new signals is likely due to the differences in when and where floats make measurements. The magnitude of difference between prior estimates of the Southern Ocean carbon flux and our new approach is significant, similar to 20% of the contemporary global ocean carbon flux. It is therefore crucial to understand how this may impact the global carbon cycle, and we show that a compensating flux must be found somewhere within the Southern Hemisphere

Reviews and syntheses: An empirical spatiotemporal description of the global surface-atmosphere carbon fluxes: opportunities and data limitations

Understanding the global carbon (C) cycle is of crucial importance to map current and future climate dynamics relative to global environmental change. A full characterization of C cycling requires detailed information on spatiotemporal patterns of surface-atmosphere fluxes. However, relevant C cycle observations are highly variable in their coverage and reporting standards. Especially problematic is the lack of integration of the carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange of the ocean, inland freshwaters and the land surface with the atmosphere. Here we adopt a data-driven approach to synthesize a wide range of observation-based spatially explicit surface-atmosphere CO2 fluxes from 2001 to 2010, to identify the state of today's observational opportunities and data limitations. The considered fluxes include net exchange of open oceans, continental shelves, estuaries, rivers, and lakes, as well as CO2 fluxes related to net ecosystem productivity, fire emissions, loss of tropical aboveground C, harvested wood and crops, as well as fossil fuel and cement emissions. Spatially explicit CO2 fluxes are obtained through geostatistical and/ or remote-sensing-based upscaling, thereby minimizing biophysical or biogeochemical assumptions encoded in process-based models. We estimate a bottom-up net C exchange (NCE) between the surface (land, ocean, and coastal areas) and the atmosphere. Though we provide also global estimates, the primary goal of this study is to identify key uncertainties and observational shortcomings that need to be prioritized in the expansion of in situ observatories. Uncertainties for NCE and its components are derived using resampling. In many regions, our NCE estimates agree well with independent estimates from other sources such as process-based models and atmospheric inversions. This holds for Europe (mean +/- 1 SD: 0.8 +/- 0.1 PgC yr(-1), positive numbers are sources to the atmosphere), Russia (0.1 +/- 0.4 PgC yr(-1)), East Asia (1.6 +/- 0.3 PgC yr(-1)), South Asia (0.3 +/- 0.1 PgC yr(-1)), Australia (0.2 +/- 0.3 PgC yr(-1)), and most of the Ocean regions. Our NCE estimates give a likely too large CO2 sink in tropical areas such as the Amazon, Congo, and Indonesia. Overall, and because of the overestimated CO2 uptake in tropical lands, our global bottom-up NCE amounts to a net sink of 5.4 +/- 2.0 PgC yr(-1). By contrast, the accurately measured mean atmospheric growth rate of CO2 over 2001-2010 indicates that the true value of NCE is a net CO2 source of 4.3 +/- 0.1 PgC yr(-1). This mismatch of nearly 10 PgC yr(-1) highlights observational gaps and limitations of data-driven models in tropical lands, but also in North America. Our uncertainty assessment provides the basis for setting priority regions where to increase carbon observations in the future. High on the priority list are tropical land regions, which suffer from a lack of in situ observations. Second, extensive pCO(2) data are missing in the Southern Ocean. Third, we lack observations that could enable seasonal estimates of shelf, estuary, and inland water-atmosphere C exchange. Our consistent derivation of data uncertainties could serve as prior knowledge in multicriteria optimization such as the Carbon Cycle Data Assimilation System (CCDAS) and atmospheric inversions, without over-or under-stating bottom-up data credibility. In the future, NCE estimates of carbon sinks could be aggregated at national scale to compare with the official national inventories of CO2 fluxes in the land use, land use change, and forestry sector, upon which future emission reductions are proposed