Abstract
Climatologies, or long-term averages, of essential climate variables are useful for evaluating models and providing a baseline for studying anomalies. The Surface Ocean CO<inf>2</inf> Atlas (SOCAT) has made millions of global underway sea surface measurements of CO<inf>2</inf> publicly available, all in a uniform format and presented as fugacity, f<inf>CO2</inf>. As f<inf>CO2</inf> is highly sensitive to temperature, the measurements are only valid for the instantaneous sea surface temperature (SST) that is measured concurrently with the in-water CO<inf>2</inf> measurement. To create a climatology of f<inf>CO2</inf> data suitable for calculating air-sea CO<inf>2</inf> fluxes, it is therefore desirable to calculate f<inf>CO2</inf> valid for a more consistent and averaged SST. This paper presents the OceanFlux Greenhouse Gases methodology for creating such a climatology. We recomputed SOCAT's f<inf>CO2</inf> values for their respective measurement month and year using monthly composite SST data on a 1° × 1° grid from satellite Earth observation and then extrapolated the resulting f<inf>CO2</inf> values to reference year 2010. The data were then spatially interpolated onto a 1° × 1° grid of the global oceans to produce 12 monthly f<inf>CO2</inf> distributions for 2010, including the prediction errors of f<inf>CO2</inf> produced by the spatial interpolation technique. The partial pressure of CO<inf>2</inf> (p<inf>CO2</inf>) is also provided for those who prefer to use p<inf>CO2</inf>. The CO<inf>2</inf> concentration difference between ocean and atmosphere is the thermodynamic driving force of the air-sea CO<inf>2</inf> flux, and hence the presented f<inf>CO2</inf> distributions can be used in air-sea gas flux calculations together with climatologies of other climate variables.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 519-541 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Ocean Science |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 8 Jul 2015 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Oceanography
- Palaeontology
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David Kevin Woolf
- School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society - Associate Professor
- School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society, Institute for Life and Earth Sciences - Associate Professor
Person: Academic (Research & Teaching)