Estimating the Southern Ocean Air-Sea Carbon Exchanges

Matthew R Mazloff, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States, Ariane Verdy, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States and Bruce D Cornuelle, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States
Abstract:
Observations of air-sea fluxes in the Southern Ocean are extremely limited. Exchanges may be inferred, however, by observing changes in ocean property inventories. Autonomous floats equipped with biogeochemical sensors are now being deployed, giving us an unprecedented opportunity to determine the oceanic carbon content and thus deduce the integrated air-sea CO2 exchanges. Here we rely on the statistics of a general circulation ocean model with biogeochemistry to estimate that the planned float array will constrain the variance in air-sea carbon fluxes by over 60%. We also present the estimated air-sea carbon fluxes from a recently developed biogeochemical Southern Ocean State Estimate (SOSE).
Back to: Physical and Biogeochemical Processes in the Southern Ocean: Observations, State Estimation, and Modeling III