Hindcasting the uptake of anthropogenic trace gases with an eddy-permitting model of the Atlantic Ocean

Abstract

The ocean takes up a large fraction of the pertubation C02 that enters the atmosphere by human activity. A realistic representation of this uptake in numerical models is essential for future climate studies. Uptake of C02 or other atmospheric trace gases is strongly influenced by oceanic physical variability at spatial scales between 20 and 100 km. Our main goal is to study the effect of this mesoscale variability on the cumulative uptake of anthropogenic C02 and chlorofluorocarbons using an existing model of the ocean circulation in the Atlantic that resolves a significant part of that variability explicitly because of its grid spacing of about 20 km. Results are compared with simulated trace gas distribution obtained from a model with coarser resolution