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.

Full Text

FilePagesSizeAccess
Publisher's official version
178 Mo
Preprint
304 Mo
How to cite
Landschuetzer Peter, Laruelle Goulven G., Roobaert Alizee, Regnier Pierre (2020). A uniform pCO(2) climatology combining open and coastal oceans. Earth System Science Data. 12 (4). 2537-2553. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-2537-2020, https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00676/78823/

Copy this text