Southern Ocean heat and carbon uptake: mechanisms, recent trends, and future changes

Abstract:

The Southern Ocean’s dominant influence on the global heat balance and nutrient and carbon cycles stems from the fact that it is the primary gateway through which Earth’s cold, centuries old and nutrient rich deep and bottom waters interact with the atmosphere. The westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere drive a strongly divergent surface flow that draws up water from below in a wide ring circling the Antarctic continent.

In the first part of the talk, we assess the uptake, transport, and storage of oceanic anthropogenic carbon and heat in the Southern Ocean over the period 1861-2005 in a new set of carbon-climate Earth System Models. Simulations show that the Southern Ocean south of 30°S, covering only 30% of the global surface ocean area, accounts for more than 40% of global anthropogenic carbon uptake. Furthermore, the Southern Ocean takes up three quarters of the total excess heat generated by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Anthropogenic carbon and heat storage show a common broad-scale pattern of change, but ocean heat storage is more structured than ocean carbon storage suggesting that different mechanisms are important. The Southern Ocean, however, remains the region where models differ the most in the representation of anthropogenic carbon and, in particular, heat uptake.

While the Southern Ocean carbon uptake has increased considerably in recent decades, as expected based on the substantial increase in atmospheric CO2, there is considerable concern that this sink will saturate or even reverse in response to warming, changing ocean circulation and chemistry. In the second part of the talk, novel multi-millennial global warming simulations with a comprehensive Earth System Model under a 1% yr^-1 atmospheric CO2 increase to 2xCO2 and constant forcing thereafter scenario will be used to explore future long-term changes in the Southern Ocean carbon uptake. We show that after full equilibration of the model with doubling of atmospheric CO2, the deep Southern Ocean is actually better ventilated and oxygenated than at present day. Such a millennial-scale increase in Southern Ocean deep-water formation under global warming increases the ocean inventory of preformed nutrients and ultimately decreases the carbon uptake capacity of the ocean.