Tracking the Variable North Atlantic Sink for Atmospheric CO 2

• Published in: Science
• Main Authors: Watson, Andrew J., Schuster, Ute, Bakker, Dorothee C. E., Bates, Nicholas R., Corbière, Antoine, González-Dávila, Melchor, Friedrich, Tobias, Hauck, Judith, Heinze, Christoph, Johannessen, Truls, Körtzinger, Arne, Metzl, Nicolas, Olafsson, Jon, Olsen, Are, Oschlies, Andreas, Padin, X. Antonio, Pfeil, Benjamin, Santana-Casiano, J. Magdalena, Steinhoff, Tobias, Telszewski, Maciej, Rios, Aida F., Wallace, Douglas W. R., Wanninkhof, Rik
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2009
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1177394; https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.1177394

A Happy Marriage The fluxes of CO 2 between the atmosphere and ocean are large and variable, and understanding why the concentration of atmospheric CO 2 changes as it does, depends on accurately determining the details of those fluxes. One of the major obstacles in the way of quantifying this exchange is that there are too few measurements available, both temporally and geographically. Watson et al. (p. 1391 ) report results from a happy marriage of science and commerce—data collected by instruments fitted onto commercial ships plying the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean—that has generated the largest and most comprehensive set of measurements of ocean pCO 2 ever collected. These data allow the oceanic CO 2 sink to be monitored with unprecedented accuracy and will help researchers precisely map regional interannual air-sea fluxes.