The Surface Ocean Carbon Dioxide Atlas (SOCAT) – A Solid Data Base for Carbon Related Research

Tobias Steinhoff1, Dorothee C E Bakker2, Richard H Wanninkhof3, Kim Currie4, Camilla Landa5,6, Peter Landschutzer7, Nicolas Metzl8, Shin-ichiro Nakaoka9, Yukihiro Nojiri9, Kevin O'Brien10, Are Olsen5,6, Benjamin Pfeil5,6, Ute Schuster11, Karl Matthew Smith12, Bronte D Tilbrook13 and all international SOCAT contributors, (1)GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Kiel, Germany, (2)University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom, (3)NOAA AOML, Ocean Chemistry and Escosystem Division, Miami, FL, United States, (4)NIWA National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Wellington, New Zealand, (5)University of Bergen, Geophysical Institute, Bergen, Norway, (6)Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway, (7)Environmental Physics, Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, (8)Sorbonne Universités (UPMC, Univ Paris 06), Paris, France, (9)CGER/NIES, Tsukuba, Japan, (10)University of Washington Seattle Campus, JISAO, Seattle, WA, United States, (11)University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom, (12)JISAO, Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States, (13)CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Hobart, Australia
Abstract:
The Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (SOCAT) is an activity by the international marine carbon research community. It improves access to surface water CO2 data by regular releases of quality controlled and documented, synthesis fCO2 (fugacity of carbon dioxide) data products for the global surface oceans and coastal seas. The first version of SOCAT was publicly released in September 2011(Bakker et al., 2011) with 6.3 million observations. In June 2013 version 2 was released including already over 10 million observations and in September 2015 SOCAT version 3 was released with more than 14 million observations. With the release of version 3 in September 2015 a big step was made in the direction of an annual updated database by using an automated data ingestion and quality control tool. The database holds now data from 1957 to today which enables SOCAT data products the detection of changes in the ocean carbon sink.

Here we present the innovations in version 3 and give an outlook of the next version(s) of SOCAT. A major improvement in version 3 is the inclusion of data from alternative sensors with a lower accuracy (better than 10 µatm) compared to the standard instrumentation (2 µatm), since their number will increase in the future. In addition exemplary studies using the SOCAT database will be presented which demonstrate the potential of the SOCAT database and point out possible improvements for the future.

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