A steep road to climate stabilization: The only way to stabilize Earth’s climate is to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but future changes in the carbon cycle might make this more difficult than has been thought.

SupplementInternational audienceThe only way to stabilize Earth’s climate is to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but future changes in the carbon cycle might make this more difficult than has been thought

Trends in marine dissolved oxygen: Implications for ocean circulation changes and the carbon budget

Recent measurements and model studies have consistently identified a decreasing trend in the concentration of dissolved O2 in the ocean over the last several decades. This trend has important implications for our understanding of anthropogenic climate change. First, the observed oceanic oxygen changes may be a signal of the beginning of a reorganization of large-scale ocean circulation in response to anthropogenic radiative forcing. Second, the repartitioning of oxygen between the ocean and the atmosphere requires a revision of the current atmospheric carbon budget and the estimates of the terrestrial and oceanic carbon sinks as calculated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from measurements of atmospheric O2/N2

Enhanced CO2 outgassing in the Southern Ocean from a positive phase of the Southern Annular Mode

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles 21 (2007): GB2026, doi:10.1029/2006GB002900.We investigate the interannual variability in the flux of CO2 between the atmosphere and the Southern Ocean on the basis of hindcast simulations with a coupled physical-biogeochemical-ecological model with particular emphasis on the role of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). The simulations are run under either pre-industrial or historical CO2 concentrations, permitting us to separately investigate natural, anthropogenic, and contemporary CO2 flux variability. We find large interannual variability (±0.19 PgC yr−1) in the contemporary air-sea CO2 flux from the Southern Ocean (<35°S). Forty-three percent of the contemporary air-sea CO2 flux variance is coherent with SAM, mostly driven by variations in the flux of natural CO2, for which SAM explains 48%. Positive phases of the SAM are associated with anomalous outgassing of natural CO2 at a rate of 0.1 PgC yr−1 per standard deviation of the SAM. In contrast, we find an anomalous uptake of anthropogenic CO2 at a rate of 0.01 PgC yr−1 during positive phases of the SAM. This uptake of anthropogenic CO2 only slightly mitigates the outgassing of natural CO2, so that a positive SAM is associated with anomalous outgassing in contemporaneous times. The primary cause of the natural CO2 outgassing is anomalously high oceanic partial pressures of CO2 caused by elevated dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) concentrations. These anomalies in DIC are primarily a result of the circulation changes associated with the southward shift and strengthening of the zonal winds during positive phases of the SAM. The secular, positive trend in the SAM has led to a reduction in the rate of increase of the uptake of CO2 by the Southern Ocean over the past 50 years.This work was supported by NASA headquarters under the Earth System Science Fellowship Grant NNG05GP78H to N. S. L. and grants NAG5-12528 and NNG04GH53G to N. G. Both S. C. D. and I. D. L. were supported by NSF/ONR NOPP (N000140210370) and NASA (NNG05GG30G)

A modeling study of the seasonal oxygen budget of the global ocean

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research 112 (2007): C05017, doi:10.1029/2006JC003731.An ecosystem model embedded in a global ocean general circulation model is used to quantify roles of biological and physical processes on seasonal oxygen variations. We find that the thermally induced seasonal net outgassing (SNO) of oxygen is overestimated by about 30% if gas phase equilibrium is assumed, and we find that seasonal variations in thermocline oxygen due to biology are approximated well using the oxygen anomaly. Outside the tropics and the north Indian Ocean, biological SNO is, on average, 56% of net community production (defined as net oxygen production above 76 m) during the outgassing period and 35% of annual net community production. In the same region the seasonal drawdown of the oxygen anomaly within the upper thermocline (76–500 m) is 76% of the remineralization during the drawdown and 48% of annual remineralization. Applying model-derived relationships to observed O2 climatologies and using independent estimates for tropical and monsoonal systems, we estimate global net community production to be 14.9 ± 2.5 Pg C yr−1.R.N., X.J., and F.L. were supported from the following grants: NOAA NA16GP2987, NASA NAG5-6451, and NSF OCE-9711937

Measurement of interaction between aroma compounds and the protein beta-lactoglobulin by spectroscopic methods

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Measurement of interaction between aroma compounds and the protein beta-lactoglobulin by spectroscopic methods

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LOCARN: Low Opex Capex Architecture for Resilient Networks

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